A leader we haven’t appreciated enough: ‘I had the audacity to be a Black woman with a voice.’
Yvonne Walker deserved better. For 13 years, Walker was the president of SEIU Local 1000, California’s largest state worker union, and she was a force who zealously fought for her members but also cared deeply about her community.
Walker left office last week after losing in a low-turnout election to a guy who campaigned against everything she believed.
If it was a bitter pill to swallow, Walker hasn’t shown it. She remains positive and forward-thinking. She’s going to take a month off and figure out her next cause. When Walker posed for a portrait for The Bee last week, she was beaming.
Walker is going to be fine.
Her union? That’s a whole different question. Her defeat is a turning point in labor politics in California and Sacramento and, quite frankly, the implications are troubling.
When I last wrote about Walker three years ago she was bracing for the eventual U.S. Supreme Court ruling that stripped public employee unions of their ability to collect fees from non-members to cover the cost of the collective bargaining from which they benefit. The case was Janus v. American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31. It was heavily funded by conservative donors for the intended purpose of weakening unions.
“We’re going to take a hit,” Walker told me then. “We’re being attacked by folks that are afraid of our collective voices.”
Strident unions
Look what has happened since then.
Richard Louis Brown is now the president of SEIU Local 1000. He wants the union out of politics. He wants to cut union dues. He attacks his opponents with big BOLD LETTERS. He acts and sounds pretty anti-union for a union leader.
Is Brown the hit that Walker predicted her union would take? And there is a larger consequence here. The odious Janus case has caused other unions to feel they have to be more strident to survive.
The Sacramento City Teachers Association has been strident for years, but it is hitting a new level now by voting “no confidence” in Jorge Aguilar, the Sacramento Unified School District superintendent.
All seven members of the SCUSD board, people elected by city voters, support Aguilar. The divisiveness of SCTA tactics only hurt school kids and enrollment, the lifeblood of the district.
What’s missing from this bipolar equation of Brown, the new anti-union-sounding union leader at SEIU Local 1000, and the scorched earth politics of SCTA?
Yvonne Walker is missing.
Walker, 61, won impressive pay hikes for her members but also sold them on pay reductions when California’s fiscal health was in tatters during the great recession. Walker staked her reputation on making sure her members didn’t retire into poverty. She was a major figure in the push to raise the state’s minimum hourly wage to $15 and on the issues of rent control and affordable housing.
She also used her platform to say, without equivocation, that “Black Lives Matter.”
Right now, Brown’s most distinguishing feature is that he makes cool videos. In other words, Brown is the anti-Yvonne Walker.
She is a force
Walker wasn’t concerned with being witty or pithy. She wanted to get things done and she did. She thought big and acted accordingly.
Walker was an influencer in Sacramento and California. Every mayor of Sacramento counted her as an important ally and sounding board.
But even big personalities such as Kevin Johnson and Darrell Steinberg knew they had to be ready when they sat at a negotiating table with her.
An ex-Marine, the first Black person, and the first woman to head her union, Walker was usually the toughest and smartest person in any room she entered to negotiate contracts for her members.
Walker represented 96,000 members. Roughly 40,000 of them live and work in the Sacramento area.
Has there been a more high profile woman, or a more high profile Black woman, in Sacramento between May of 2008, when Walker was first elected, to last week, when she left office?
This leader was self-made. She forced the biggest people in California to respect her and she didn’t have a college degree. She’s a mom, raised three kids. She didn’t drive her first new car until she was 50. When she first took over her union, she was stunned by critics who accused her of being “corrupt” and worse.
“It was incredibly hurtful and demoralizing,” she said. “My brother Googled me and then he called me and said, ‘Are you OK?’ I had the audacity to be a Black woman with a voice and I used my voice.”
She did and we needed that voice. Without it, the Sacramento labor scene seems shrill and polarized. Who is out there now in union leadership who not only worries about members but about our broader community?
Yvonne Walker did and I asked her if she paid a political price for her activism.
“Yes, I did,” she said to me last week.” “But it was a price worth paying and I would pay that price again and again and again.”
This story was originally published July 7, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
