MD

We’re still in a movement-building moment, though we can win some breakthroughs at the state level. I look at it as you would in an organizing drive. We’re at that moment right before the boss really finds out what’s going on. There’s wide support among the workers, but it hasn’t been tested and the boss hasn’t weighed in yet.

This is the moment when we have to prepare for the counterattack. Figure out who our friends are and build the type of coalitions we need to resist the medical-industrial complex. Do the type of inoculation you would do in an organizing drive. Prepare people for the attacks and arguments the other side will use when they try to discredit us.

There are huge forces that benefit from the current health care system. We can’t have any illusions about what we’re going to face as we move into the endgame of actually winning a referendum or passing a bill.

On the West Coast, California, Washington, and Oregon are all moving in the same direction toward voter initiatives, though it’s too early to tell whether it will happen in a coordinated fashion. They have substantial resources, substantial labor support, and an understanding of what it takes to win initiatives in those states. We need to focus on scaling up our organizing capacity. In California you need something like $100 million and ten thousand door-knockers to run a credible initiative in the face of huge opposition.

The debates going on now within the Campaign for a Healthy California are crucial, and they’re informed by earlier failures in Vermont and Colorado. There’s a rift about how to move forward, and it has much to do with the relationship a lot of unions have to the Democratic establishment.

The speaker of the California Assembly, by all accounts a pro-labor Democrat, has bottled up a Medicare-for-All bill in an administrative committee and refused to release it. Some want to go after the Democratic establishment. Other unions take a more cautious approach; they want to softly influence the process.

You have to talk about how to move into the endgame; that’s how you find out who your friends are. You have to confront the Democratic establishment. It’s bringing out all the fault lines both within labor and in the broader movement.

Similar things will happen in New York as they get closer to victory. So one thing we’re doing with the Labor Campaign for Single Payer is to prepare labor supporters for the next push.