All Eyes on Georgia

By MALC President Pam Fendt

As the country awaits the outcome of yesterday’s Georgia Senate runoff election, I want to give a shout out to President Charlie Flemming of the Georgia AFL-CIO.  That Georgia win for President Elect Biden (49.5% of the vote, but whew, it’s a win.  You know, the one that is driving President Trump crazzzzy.) was due to the activism of the labor movement, in concert with many on-the-ground and deeply connected community organizations who staffed teams of organizers to knock doors, deliver literature about voting rights, where and how to register, locations of polling sites, and information about candidates.  During the pandemic.  It has been dangerous and necessary work.  And it looks like it could be laying the groundwork for a win.  The Zoom clip is from an online meeting Monday to update labor partners across the country on all the Georgia activity leading up to the election.

I met Charlie Flemming about 15 years ago, as part of the Partnership for Working Families network.  I was privileged to travel to Georgia and see the work that labor, faith, and community partnerships were doing to create community benefits, including good union jobs, with large development projects planned for Atlanta and the surrounding area.  In addition, I got to meet Deborah Scott, Executive Director of GA STAND-UP (Georgia Strategic Alliance for New Directions and Unified Policies), and learn from her experience.  This Think-and-Do tank has been working to better the community for a long time. Their work has helped birth organizations like Stand Up Nashville, Pittsburgh United, and others.

Leading up to the November election and every minute since the runoff started, the AFL-CIO and its constituency groups APRI and LCLAA, GA Stand Up, Fair Fight, Mijente, the Georgia NAACP and ACLU, and many other grassroots groups worked tirelessly.  Stacey Abrams founded Fair Fight a decade ago!  We all owe them a debt of thanks and to also work as hard to keep the momentum of the Biden-Harris victory and to press forward without stopping on labor’s priorities in the administration’s first 100 days in office.  Fixing the federal COVID-19 response is first on the ticket, but a close second is relief for the every day working people who have been hit so hard in the economic downturn caused by the Trump administration’s failed response.  There are many exciting ideas in the Biden Build Back Better plan, but to see them to fruition, we can’t take our foot off the gas.

Solidarity, onward and upward in 2021.