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It was 97 degrees outside, and Greg Casar was in a fragrance store, looking for an envelope.
He had marched on that June evening with about 30 workers from two restaurants owned by the mogul Stephen Starr. They stopped first at St. Anselm, a steakhouse in the historic Union Market District in Northeast Washington, D.C., where 85 percent of the workers signed cards seeking union representation and later won an election. But the STARR Restaurant Group argued that the election was void because the Trump administration’s National Labor Relations Board had only two of its five seats filled, one less than a quorum, and therefore could not certify the results.
Casar, a second-term congressmember from Austin, Texas, had visited St. Anselm once before, in February, and the STARR Group’s leadership promised him then that it would honor employee wishes. But St. Anselm and another restaurant, Pastis, not only broke that promise; they started reducing hours, changing work rules, and even firing union-supporting workers. “I haven’t had a raise in two years,” one baker told Casar at a meetup before the march. “I can barely afford my rent.”
St. Anselm workers had signed a petition demanding wage hikes and union recognition. But the hostess told Casar she was not authorized to accept anything related to the labor dispute. Casar had experienced these indignities from management a million times as a labor organizer. It wasn’t going to deter him.
“Sometimes one of the tactics that our restaurant uses is to make us feel small and powerless,” said Bridget, a baker at St. Anselm. “Having a member of Congress there … makes us feel as if what we’re doing is legitimate.”
Casar suggested that they could seal the petition in an envelope for the hostess to deliver to her superiors. That was deemed acceptable. Now they needed the envelope.
The fragrance store was next door. “A weird fact about me is, really strong perfume gives me a little lightheadedness, I hate it,” Casar said later. “So actually going into there, I was like, I gotta get in and out.” The mission proved unsuccessful. But someone fashioned a sheet of loose-leaf paper into an envelope, stuck the petition inside, and the hostess took it. Chants of “¡Si se puede!” broke out among the mostly Spanish-speaking workers.
Casar was 1,500 miles from his constituents. It was the hottest day of the year so far in D.C. He was on his own time. There were no TV cameras. I was the only press.
A couple of days later, in his Capitol Hill office, Casar told me the march was “the most fun I had all week, man! … It’s a whole lot better than sitting in a committee hearing.” He believed his presence, as the second-highest ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, could make a difference in the unionization fight. But secondarily, he considered it a way to stay grounded, outside the trappings of power and in solidarity with the kind of people who brought him to Washington. “We need more congressmen and -women,” Casar told me, “who feel more comfortable marching into a fancy D.C. restaurant with a union than mingling inside of one with lobbyists.”
In January, Casar, who is 36 and just three years removed from serving on the Austin City Council, took over as the tenth chair in the history of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It was an inauspicious moment to be a leader on the left in Washington. Donald Trump had just swept back into the presidency, winning dramatic gains in many urban precincts represented by many CPC members. Many big liberal cities were under assault from ICE raids and threats to federal funding. Notwithstanding the cautious, business-friendly Kamala Harris campaign, centrist Democrats had already decided to blame progressives for her loss and every other loss of the past half-century, forming new groups and fundraising schemes to steer the party to the right.
What bothered Casar most was waning support for Democrats from working-class voters, something he had seen firsthand on the campaign trail for Harris. He saw it as an existential crisis for the party of the New Deal and Great Society, predicated on fighting for the common man and woman. “If we become a party of upper-income people, then I think we’re toast because we become a contradiction in and of ourselves as a party,” he said. |
