UNITE-HERE's New President: Union Will Double Organizing Expenditures To $20 Million
In an in-depth interview, UNITE-HERE's new president talks about the union's future plans.
By Peter List, Editor | June 20, 2024
UNITE-HERE, a union that represents workers in various industries, including hotels, food service, laundry, warehouse, and casino gaming, plans to double its spending on organizing workers to $20 million per year.
Gwen Mills, the new president of UNITE-HERE, announced in a lengthy interview with labor writer Hamilton Nolan that the union will double its organizing spending to $20 million annually.
Mills, who was elected as the union’s first female president at the union’s convention on Thursday after D. Taylor announced in April he was stepping down, did not specify where exactly the union will allocate its resources, but stated:
We’ve been heavily focused on growing in the South and non-union places, but we also have cities where we have a medium density, and an investment in those cities could get you to maximum density, and those are markets that are important to the industry. That’s a real ongoing discussion and deliberation within the union.
The disclosure that UNITE-HERE will double its organizing expenditures comes at a time when unions have experienced a higher level of success not seen in decades in unionizing workers.
Nolan notes that “formula for building political power for low-wage workers through rigorous, systematic labor organizing is a model for all unions.”
With 2024 being an election year, Mills explains how UNITE-HERE mobilizes during elections:
Just like I was talking about the army of volunteers within our union that it’ll take to shift on union organizing, the heart of our political program is members who take leaves of absence from their jobs to knock on doors in their community. Their ability to cut through a lot of the noise, the apathy around the elections, all of the challenges—that’s the heart of it. Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada are key battleground states for us.
In the 2020 election, UNITE-HERE was instrumental in turning out voters for the Biden-Harris campaign in Arizona.
“We knocked on 800,000 doors, made 2.5 million calls, talked to 250,000 Arizonans,” stated UNITE-HERE Local 11, “and won the state for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris!”
Read Hamilton Nolan’s entire interview with Gwen Mills here.