By Lolita Owens, Philadelphia, 22-year home care worker with SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania
At SEIU’s recent convention in my hometown of Philadelphia, I just had the profound honor of helping SEIU elect its BRAND NEW President and leadership team. We voted for leaders who have the backs of SEIU’s 2 million members, as well as millions more workers across our country.
April Verrett will now lead this union into a new era of worker power! We’re in high spirits and we hope you’ll join us in welcoming April, SEIU’s first Black woman president, to her new position.
Like the birthplace of SEIU, April hails from Chicago. And like too many working folks in our nation, April’s young life wasn’t easy.
Before she was 10 years old she experienced firsthand the effects of structural racism and economic hardship. When her parents passed away at an early age, April’s grandmother, a proud SEIU union steward, stepped in to raise her. She taught her the promise of collective power.
From this point on, SEIU and worker organizing was central to April’s life. She found her purpose through her first organizing job with SEIU Local 73 and never looked back!
April encompasses the energy, spirit, and fight that will lead this union, our union, to win the future. She refuses to settle and is poised to use all the resources and tools we as workers have to agitate, disrupt, challenge, and FIGHT the status quo. She is driven by her vision to end poverty-wage work once and for all.
We also elected our new Secretary-Treasurer Rocio Sáenz. Rocío, like April, is breaking barriers by becoming the first Latina to serve in the role of SEIU Secretary-Treasurer. When Rocio first arrived in the United States as a young Mexican immigrant, she knew building worker power was a key part of how she, and her fellow workers, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, could get ahead. She has fought for the last 30 years to build that power. Now, in her new role, she’ll help push for more.
On top of electing new leaders, SEIU members just approved a 10-year plan that includes growing our union by 1 million members!
SEIU workers are no strangers to taking risks and shaking the status quo.
We are setting a course for transformational change that will continue to unite across industries and generations to create a future where Black, brown, Asian, indigenous, and white workers make the rules, together, not the wealthy and powerful.
THIS IS HOW WE'LL DO IT:
> Win Worker Power
We will win bold, groundbreaking sectoral organizing victories that raise standards for workers and open the doors of unions to workers who have been written out and written off.
> Win Political Power
We will mobilize a multiracial voter base that demands Unions for All, LOUD AND CLEAR. We will unleash worker-led disruption against corporate union busters and demand new rules to build worker power. We will fight back by stopping attacks on our democracy in this year’s election.
> Win the Future
We will embrace forward-looking power by investing in local leadership, training thousands of new organizers, being an anti-racist union fighting to dismantle structural racism, embracing technology and shaping how it impacts workers, empowering younger members, and working to unite the North American labor movement and our allies around our demand for Unions for All
This union is our union. We are part of a global community of compassionate workers fighting so that everyone—of every race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and immigration status—can share the fruits of a just, inclusive society with dignity and joy.
This union, this resolution for the future, and this fight to win the future definitely includes you too. We look forward to all we can do together for workers everywhere.
FORWARD! To the next 10 years of worker power!
