Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign is the latest to show it’s a friend of organized labor, with an announcement Thursday that some of the White House hopeful’s staffers will enter a union.
“Today marks a victory not only for our workers, but for campaign staff across the country asking for improved labor provisions, asking for appreciation as a collective whole and asking for a chance to be recognized as more than simply an employee,” read a statement from Yang field organizer Chad Young. “I am excited to join together with my coworkers in becoming Campaign Workers Guild members.”
As of Thursday, only members of Yang’s Iowa and Nevada campaigns would be admitted into the union. Typically, those who work in state offices are those most vulnerable to layoffs after the states’ respective caucuses.
The campaigns for every front-runner, including former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, feature some form of organized labor within their organizations. The range and generosity of contracts negotiated by each campaign varies greatly.
Sanders’s campaign, for example, offers the broadest membership and most generous benefits of the field, which include 57 days of paid leave. A number of political strategists have questioned the wisdom of a unionized campaign, pointing to the necessity of such operations to be nimble and cost-effective.
Other campaigns, such as Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s, Biden’s, and Buttigieg’s, offer union membership only to field organizers. The specifics of those contracts haven’t been released to the public.
