In Las Vegas, 2020 presidential candidates advocate for workers, unions

Six Democratic presidential candidates gathered in Las Vegas today for the National Forum on Wages and Working People, which was sponsored by the Service Employees International Union and the Center for American Progress.

It was the most high-profile gathering of 2020 candidates in Nevada yet, with the hopefuls speaking throughout the day at The Enclave to a gathered crowd of around 250 people.

There were six speakers — Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Cali., Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, past Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and past Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro.

The candidates did not include apparent front-runners Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, who have been leading in the polls.

One of the most prevalent issues in the forum was a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour. All of the candidates said they support the issue in some form — from Klobuchar’s support of a $15 increase by 2024 to Hickenlooper’s staggered hike depending on the cost of living in certain areas.

Hickenlooper also added that he would increase the minimum wage above $15 in cities with a higher cost of living, such as Los Angeles.

“It’s a fundamental question about who government’s going to work for,” Warren said. “Is it just going to work for those at the top? Or is it going to work for everyone else?”

Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, was the target of multiple candidates Saturday. The act cut the top corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

According to the Brookings Institution, a nominally nonpartisan think tank that has been called liberal, the cut created a $275 revenue shortfall throughout 2018, bucking claims by many Republicans that the cut would trigger economic growth that would pay for itself.

“Look at the Trump-Republican tax breaks, right. A trillion-and-a-half bucks,” Warren said. “And where did most of that go? Most of that went to a handful right at the top. The folks who already have plenty of opportunity.”

Klobuchar said that Republicans tipped the scales in favor of the wealthy by enacting the tax bill.

“I think a lot of this has happened because the playing field has been tipped to one side, and that is to the wealthy,” Klobuchar said. “You see it in that Republican tax bill, you see where those benefits went. You have money in the Bahamas? Okay, well, if you don’t you didn’t benefit from that tax bill.”

Healthcare, perhaps the most divisive issue between the progressive and moderate wings of the party, was also frequently discussed. While essentially every candidate in the race has policy ideas in regard to expanding Medicare in some form, exactly what form that would take is up for debate between the candidates.

Some, including Warren and Castro, support a Medicare-for-All proposal, a form of single payer healthcare. Harris has gone farther in the past, saying she would end private insurance wholesale.

Others, like Klobuchar and O’Rourke, support a public option, essentially allowing citizens to choose between private insurance and buying into Medicare or a Medicare-like program.

“Everyone that doesn’t not have Medicare today — automatically enrolled in Medicare. Those (with) insufficient care or too expensive care are able to choose to enroll in Medicare,” O’Rourke said. “And then others, through their unions or through their employers who have employer-sponsored insurance, and choose to keep it are able to do so. That is the quickest, surest path to get to guaranteed, high-quality universal health care for every single American.”

Hickenlooper joined the ranks of the more cautious, mirroring his position on a minimum wage increase — essentially, get there eventually, but not overnight.

“I think Medicare for All, to get there overnight, would be a revolution,” Hickenlooper said. He said, though, that a public option will help get there over time and wouldn’t remove private insurance from people who like their plans.

“It will be an evolution, not a revolution,” he said.

The SEIU’s position is that healthcare is a “human right,” a position many of the candidates speaking Saturday agreed with.

Nationwide, Medicare extensions poll well, with some caveats. In a recent poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, 56 percent of poll respondents supported single-payer healthcare and 75 percent supported a Medicare buy-in option.

Adding context that these options may cause taxes to increase or delay medical treatments makes the numbers drop fairly dramatically, however.

In a national environment where labor unions have lost much of their historic strength, appealing to the unions in Nevada — and especially Las Vegas — is still strategically viable, with most 2020 candidates hosting events with unions when they come to town.

Almost 14 percent of wage and salary workers were in a union in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That comes out to about 191,000 union members, alongside 25,000 employees represented by unions without having membership.

In a state with a slightly more than 3 million people, that’s not an insubstantial number, and the event was a testament to the power of unions in the Nevada Democratic primary. Groups including the SEIU and the Culinary Workers’ Union have seen visits from candidates since the kickoff of the 2020 cycle.

“At every junction of my public service career I have been supportive of labor,” Castro said, speaking about his encouragement of employees to join unions while serving as mayor of San Antonio and in HUD. “I’m not just going to talk the talk, in this campaign I’m actually walking the walk on supporting the unionization of our campaign staff who are about to unionize. And we’re paying even our interns $15 an hour.”

Harris said that labor is needed in order to help combat a false narrative that opportunity is equally afforded to everyone, and to help work to make that narrative real.

“The kind of president I will be is to respect the purpose of organized labor, and to then promote that,” she said. “Understanding, look, it’s all about the bargaining, but you’ve got to allow people to start out on the same page, the same base. And part of what’s wrong with what’s been happening recently in our country and in particular under this administration, is there’s a false assumption that they’re trying to sell that everybody’s starting out on the same base. Well, that ain’t true.”