Opportunity for All

By DAVID McCALL

It broke Cynthia Overby’s heart over the years to see her students struggle to afford menstrual products, try to get by without them or skip school some days for the privacy of home.

The longtime teacher later worked with an Illinois legislator to make these essentials available on college campuses and cheered when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed legislation providing them in his own state’s public schools.

Overby, long active in the United Steelworkers (USW), knows that America’s greatness depends on lifting everyone up and providing opportunity to all. That’s why she became an educator. It’s the reason she’s devoted decades to civic and union activism.

And it’s why she’s voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Walz, in the Nov. 5 presidential election.

Harris and Walz want to empower the disadvantaged, build the middle class and ensure retirement security, harnessing the enormous strides of the past four years to continue America’s march forward.

The other candidates, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, threaten all of that. As the two bumble through a campaign devoid of decency, not to mention good ideas, they and their supporters stoop so low as to mock Walz’s kindness for others.

“That a man implemented a policy like that so warms my heart,” said Overby, a member of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) in Granite City, Ill., who has a few choice words of her own for the out-of-touch, low-class Republicans who call Walz “Tampon Tim.”

When she taught children with varying abilities, she told her students, “Help each other.” Now, she devotes part of her retirement to a super-active SOAR chapter that fights childhood hunger, raises scholarships for college students, sends holiday gifts to U.S. troops overseas and supports a local emergency shelter for women and children.

She insists that America’s leaders not only demonstrate the same level of compassion but share her determination to level the playing field for others.

“To me, it’s the most black-and-white situation,” said Overby, comparing Trump’s politics of hate with a forward-looking Harris-Walz platform that’s “for the people, to better serve the people—not just an individual or a small group—but the people.”

Among many other examples, Harris and Walz intend to expand the child tax credit and provide extra support to parents of newborns. They also pledged to work for national paid family leave, ensuring families have both the money and the time to raise children.

And they’ve shown that they mean what they say.

Harris cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to overcome Republican obstructionism and advance the American Rescue Plan, which provided a temporary increase in the child tax credit during the pandemic, while Walz signed legislation that provides Minnesotans with the nation’s leading child tax credit along with widely praised paid sick and family leave programs.

Just as important, Harris and Walz want to crack down on corporate price-gouging, lower prescription drug costs and ensure Americans who rent homes have the opportunity to buy their own. Right now, private-equity firms and other predatory property owners rig the housing market, raising rents while also pushing the dream of home ownership further out of reach for many young families.

“My daughter lives in L.A., and there’s no way” she can buy a house now, said Dawn Dooley, president of USW Local 8599, which represents workers in the Fontana (Calif.) Unified School District, noting the unfair housing market holds down her own family as well as those she serves in city schools.

While an expanded child tax credit and other Harris-Walz proposals offer a clear stepping stone for Fontana families, many of whom live in poverty, Trump and the Republicans want to step on working people.

Project 2025, a Republican game plan for shredding democracy and lining the pockets of the wealthy on the backs of average Americans, calls for cutting Medicare and raising taxes on the middle class while giving more Trump-style tax cuts to the 1%. It even calls for cutting back the number of children eligible for school-meal programs, just to save rich people a few bucks.

Dooley, a former cafeteria worker, dreads the return of days when students either went hungry or experienced the embarrassment of qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunches.

It never failed that at the beginning of every month, she recalled, some students had to forgo lunches either because their parents forgot to re-register them for the subsidized meal program or a computer glitch temporarily knocked them off the rolls.

Today, the school district provides meals to all children, no questions asked. And Dooley said she expects the next president to embrace the same humane, common-sense philosophy.

“The kids eat, no matter what,” she said.

Dan Jackson’s family-sustaining union job at the Bobcat plant in Gwinner, N.D., enables him to support Toys for Tots and other community causes. But Jackson, a member of USW Local 560, knows that what disadvantaged families truly need are pathways to the middle class.

That means continuing the manufacturing renaissance, begun by the Biden-Harris administration, that’s created millions of jobs so far. It means keeping the focus on fair trade and Buy American policies, Jackson said, citing “all the small companies” in Gwinner that employ workers supplying the Bobcat plant.

And it means giving more workers, across all industries, the freedom to exercise their labor rights and build better lives.

“I want to see the PRO Act,” said Jackson, referring to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, legislation that would make it easier for workers to form unions and hold employers accountable for violating labor rights. “And I know Harris and Walz are in favor of it.”

David McCall is International President of United Steelworkers. See the blog at USW.org.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2024

Populist.com