ANDREW GRAHAM - Press Democrat
Sep 2, 2024
Rep. Adam Schiff headlined a North Bay Labor Council pancake breakfast that featured a slate of Democratic politicians urging an all-out push to elect Vice President Kamala Harris this November.
Entering the final two months of an election season the Democratic Party has cast as pivotal for democracy itself, the North Bay’s largest labor coalition on Monday hosted a slate of politicians at its annual pancake breakfast, where they urged an all-out push to elect Vice President Kamala Harris this November.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the Southern California Democrat who is likely to become the state’s next U.S. senator, set a tone for the speakers that followed him when he said “future generations are going to want to know what we did when the fate of our country was at risk.”
Speaking ahead of fellow congressmen Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson at the North Bay Labor Council breakfast, Schiff told the crowd, “We know what we have to do in the next two months. This is on us.”
First celebrated by labor activists in 1882, Monday’s national holiday has become a key stump day for politicians, particularly on the left and particularly in a presidential election year.
Harris, her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and President Joe Biden campaigned Monday in midwestern battleground states. Former President Donald Trump, in contrast, did not have any public events scheduled, according to the New York Times.
And in southeastern Santa Rosa, on a bright sunny morning at the Teamsters Local 665 North headquarters, politician after politician urged firefighters, public employees and other labor union members and their families to find ways to volunteer in the effort to elect Harris.
Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, who is running to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom in the 2026 election, touted her initiative Californians for Choice — an effort to bus volunteers into the state’s battleground House districts, as well as competitive neighboring states like Nevada, to mobilize voters over women’s reproductive rights.
The initiative is backed almost entirely by a $4 million donation from the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the tribe that owns Graton Resort & Casino outside Rohnert Park. Tribal Chairman Greg Sarris introduced Kounalakis as well as Schiff, who the tribe has also backed with a more than $200,000 donation to a pro-Schiff political action committee.
State Superintendent Tony Thurmond, who has also announced a 2026 gubernatorial run, spoke at the event. Betty Yee, a former state controller and 2026 gubernatorial candidate, also spoke. So did state Treasurer Fiona Ma, who is mounting a campaign for lieutenant governor. So did current state Controller Malia Cohen, who in her call for political engagement this election season referenced a bouncy castle that kept children present at the event easily entertained through the long stretch of stump speeches.
“We’ve got our kids jumping in the jumpy house without a care in the world,“ she said, ”but as adults, we need to be taking this election seriously.“
Speakers cast the election as a decisive one for organized labor, whose ranks have decreased by half since the 1980s, according to the PEW Resource Center, driving political influence down with it. Huffman told attendees that a new Trump administration would seek to further roll back protections for American workers.
As he often has over the course of this summer, the San Rafael Democrat pointed to Project 2025, a policy plan published by the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation that critics say could roll back overtime pay and gut the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The Trump campaign has sought to distance itself from Project 2025 and said it will not dictate how Trump would govern in a second term.
California Senate President pro Tem Mike McGuire, a Healdsburg Democrat, was at a Labor Day event in Mendocino County and did not attend Monday’s gathering.
The holiday came amid a standoff between his chamber and Newsom, who has sought to call the Legislature back into a special session to address the gas prices Californians pay at the pump. While the Assembly has accepted Newsom’s call to reconvene and consider regulation on oil refineries that proposes to stabilize gasoline prices, McGuire announced the Senate would not do so.
It fell to Rep. Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael, to discuss the Legislature’s lawmaking on labor this year. Among other bills, he touted legislation that prevented managers from forcing their employees to attend meetings that discuss religious or political views — including decisions about whether to join a union. That bill awaits Newsom’s signature.
On the whole, however, the legislative session that wrapped up late Saturday was not a significant one for labor policy, a sharp contrast with the busy 2023, the Los Angeles Times reported.
And so on Monday, the nuts and bolts of labor policy took a back seat to a full-throated effort to sustain momentum for Harris’s campaign, and urge attendees to pitch into that effort and not rest on their laurels just because California was a shoe-in for the Democratic candidate.
“We have the chance to have a president from California, which hasn’t happened in a very long time, and that could be just a total game changer,” Schiff told The Press Democrat in a brief interview after his speech.
“By contrast, if it goes the other way, we have someone totally hostile to California,” he said, referring to Trump, who has denigrated California as a failed liberal state and clashed often with its leaders, including Schiff, one of the lead prosecutors in Trump’s first impeachment.
“There’s a lot at stake for this state,“ Schiff said.