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Safaí, the labor candidate, working to shore up union backing

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Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Ahsha Safaí. Read earlier dispatches here.


On Friday morning, Ahsha Safaí arrived at the San Francisco Labor Council’s pre-Labor Day breakfast at the InterContinental Hotel downtown at around 10 a.m. 

Safaí, who was eight years into a labor career when he first ran for public office in 2016 for District 11 supervisor, sat down next to Olga Miranda, the president of SEIU Local 87 and his former boss.

Safaí knows Miranda well: He was the political director for Local 87, which represents janitors, from 2008 to 2016, working on signing up new members in non-unionized workplaces, organizing strikes, and pressuring politicians to support the union’s various campaigns, like involving custodians in talks when the city asked residents and downtown buildings to use recycling bins.

“He’s the only candidate that came out of organized labor,” said Miranda. “He sees from the working families’ perspective, which has shrunk year by year, month by month with each administration.” 

At breakfast, unionized hotel workers served bacon, sausage, egg and pastries. “It’s better in a union” stickers were handed out to union reps and politicians. The room stood up when Rep. Nancy Pelosi ambled to the stage and gave a speech applauding labor and mobilizing them for the presidential campaign.  

In a brief moment of enmity, a woman holding a handwritten “Stop genocide” sign was escorted out of the hall; she had been protesting Israel’s war on Gaza.  

Safaí, the major mayoral candidate who has the longest history in organized labor — “I got my master’s in city planning, but my Ph.D in the labor movement,” he has said — was there to gather support. 

The Labor Council, which covers more than 150 unions representing over 100,000 union members in the city, has endorsed Connie Chan, Dean Preston and Myrna Melgar for the supervisorial races, but has not yet waded into the mayor’s race. 



Source: missionlocal.org

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