I’m so excited to write and tell you that Danielle Newsome has joined the Guild as a staff representative! Before joining the Guild, Danielle worked for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, bringing cases against employers that mistreated workers. Before that she was at a union-side labor law firm with ties to CWA District 2-13 and she was a former Guild member when she worked at the Health Professionals and Allied Employees, which is a bargaining unit at the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.
I talked with Danielle and want to share our conversation so you could get to know her.
When did you first become an activist?
In high school I engaged in some activities through an org called Philadelphia Student Union. I was not an organizer of those efforts, but I participated in several walkouts and rallies to protest the state takeover of our schools.
When I got to undergrad at Cornell, I became more involved in activism. I studied industrial and labor relations, but most of the curriculum was geared to human resources and how to protect companies instead of workers. What spurred my activism was feeling like I was surrounded by wealth and privilege, and seeing a disconnect between students that would eventually be in decision-making positions while being out of touch with the realities of working people. I wanted to push back against that and the notion that, “If poor people are unhappy they should just get better jobs.”
That wasn’t all students, but there’s a lot of rich people at Cornell — or upper middle-class kids who never had to get a job or worry about money. Being a person from Philly, it was frustrating hearing things like that, and then seeing how campus workers and workers in Ithaca were treated. That “town and gown” dynamic was present with Cornell being up on the hill. It was very stark. And the lack of diversity, on campus and citywide, was hard. Particularly seeing so few Black people. All of that was a huge contrast from where I came from and made me want to fight for working people to be seen and heard.
How did seeing that disparity engage you to be more of an activist?
My first year I was getting acclimated to just being in college. And I joined the minority Industrial Labor Relations student organization. It was mostly geared to push students into careers in HR. And by the middle of my second semester I realized it wasn’t for me. Then I got involved in the Cornell Organization for Labor Action, a student activist labor group.
What did y’all do?
We were the United Students Against Sweatshops affiliate on campus at the time. So, by my sophomore year we were doing a campaign to get the apparel suppliers for the school store to stop using sweatshops labor. Around that time the bus drivers in Ithaca were in contract negotiations so we supported their campaign. I also got involved with rural New York farmworkers rights advocacy through a student group, and became an ESL tutor for farmworkers.
Some friends and I co-founded an org called the Prison Activist Coalition. We went into the local minimum and maximum security juvenile facilities to show more Black and brown faces in the buildings and engaged with the residents. Many of the kids were from NYC who were shipped four hours away and locked up where their families couldn’t easily come to visit without cars. That group of friends also engaged in anti-racism and immigrants rights activism on campus.
I spent my last semester in Cape Town, South Africa, living with a family while doing research for the Congress of South African Trade Unions. That was an exciting end to my years of student activism and at that point I was just ready to get to work in the labor movement.
What was your first job in labor?
I started as an organizer on a campaign to try to win card check neutrality at CVS stores. The idea was that if we could put enough pressure on the company we could force it to voluntarily recognize the union when a majority of workers expressed interest. I was 21 years old and right out of college. That was a national campaign under the umbrella of Change to Win, working with Unite Here and UFCW.
What were some of the major takeaways — going up against a big employer like CVS?
It was a strategic campaign with organizers working with corporate researchers to take on a huge employer. It eventually helped lead to union recognition for thousands of CVS employees in California.
We engaged with both retail store clerks and also with pharmacists and that was my first time having organizing conversations with highly paid professional workers. Hearing their issues and how they were being mistreated in similar ways, sometimes worse ways than lower-paid workers, helped broaden my perspective on working-class struggles and solidarity. These were people making 100k a year, but many had to work 13-hour shifts without breaks. There were stories of retail pharmacists wearing adult diapers because they were tired of dealing with bladder infections.
Wait, what?
It was so strange! Having an orgazing conversation with a worker in front of their large house after making my way into their gated community – and finding out how horrible their working conditions were. The way CVS staffed sometimes meant pharmacy counters were open 8 a.m to 9 p.m. with only one pharmacist on staff all day. If you have a line of customers you can’t leave. And techs can’t operate the pharmacy without a pharmacist on site. I’ve heard it’s still happening today. It doesn’t matter how much you’re paid, corporations don’t care about the workers. They don’t have empathy.
And then you decided to go to law school — why?
After that campaign I did other retail organizing with UFCW and spent some time organizing charter school teachers with the American Federation of Teachers.
By then I was starting to feel frustrated that even organizing when workers give it their all and it’s a good campaign, the employer can still do nasty things like fire people. Even if you file a board charge and win, it can take a couple years to get a job back or back pay and people’s lives are being uprooted in the process. I asked myself, “What am I missing? How is this the model to get things done? Is the law really this crappy?”
I needed to take a break from organizing and went to law school to find a new way to help build power for working people.
And you found all the answers there?! (laughs)
The answers were what I feared. The law really is that bad. But law school was a good break for me.
I focused very much on labor and employment law, but it did not give me any answers. And school itself didn’t really help develop my skill set. I ended up building my skills during summer jobs with unions and a union-side law firm.
What was exciting working for a union-side labor firm?
The variety of clients, both public and private sector. I was working for locals in more than five states. I liked that even before I got my bar exam results they were giving me real assignments. You don’t have to be an attorney to do arbitrations or represent parties in NLRB charges. So I was doing that work right away with great mentors.
And then you went to the Health Professionals and Allied Employees, which are members of the Guild?
Right, at HPEA I got to work with staff reps on campaigns, supporting bargaining and trying to come up with ways to use grievances and arbitrations in a strategic way. I worked on the union’s education program and got to engage with all of the locals.
Our staff union affiliated with the Guild and I was on the bargaining committee when we negotiated that contract.
How did that go?
(laughs) Not great. This was 2019 and I drafted our proposal for work-from-home language. It was rejected by HPAE management. This was unsurprising but frustrating to me because we already used Zoom to work from the union’s satellite offices, some of which didn’t have any management on site. Then, less than a year later, COVID-19 forced everyone to work remotely. It’s just funny in hindsight.
But what really turned me off was that HPEA management took a heavy hand. We were asking for a lot, but we weren’t asking for unreasonable things. And I think I didn’t expect them to fight back the way they did.
And then most recently you were at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office — doing what?
Right! I was given the opportunity to create a whole new program from scratch. At the time there were only a handful of prosecutor offices that were looking at criminal prosecution of employer-committed crimes. I was intrigued to launch into this new area of law. But it was slow going. COVID shut things down six months into me being there. And it was hard to investigate the cases because law enforcement isn’t used to reviewing payroll records and such.
We did have a victory where we prosecuted a plumbing contractor who had deducted over $100,000 in dues and other union money from employee pay, as he should have, but then he never gave the money to the union. He was using it to pay bills and other things. We charged him with three counts of theft for each worker. He paid that money in restitution and was accepted into a diversion program that allowed him to avoid jail time.
Where do you find a case like that?
The law firm representing the plumbers union brought it to the office.
It seems like something’s happening in the labor movement?
There are exciting innovative approaches to organizing right now: Amazon, Starbucks and what the Guild is doing. There’s organizing of digital workspaces. Those were campaigns that 10 years ago we weren’t thinking of organizing. Or we were, but could not figure out how to do it successfully.
[The NewsGuild represents hundreds of workers at digital-only newsrooms like Buzzfeed News, Insider, Politico, Fortune, the Daily Beast, Ars Technica, Wirecutter, VT Digger, NBC News and Truthout. In March about 600 tech workers at the New York Times unionized with the Guild, representing the largest group of tech workers in the U.S. with collective bargaining power.]
But it’s exciting for millennials and younger people who didn’t necessarily grow up with an opinion about unions. Now as adults they’re seeing the value.
What does that mean?
It means we’re changing people’s perspective on labor.
I recently got into an argument with my dad. He said, “Unions are a bunch of construction workers and white guys that are very insular and won’t let people of color and women in.”
That’s very much a part of the history of labor, but it’s not the entire history.
We’re now being more explicit about how diverse labor is in terms of ages, races, gender. And because of more unionized journalists, it’s’ getting coverage and people are seeing it. Some of the biggest unions in the country represent retail and food workers, teachers or other government workers. But still, when certain people think of the labor movement, they don’t think of teachers — they think of building trades or the Teamsters from the 1970s.
A lot of people don’t realize when they go to the supermarket, at least in my area, that there’s a good chance that those are UFCW members. And the person who installs your modem for Verizon is probably a union member. We’re everywhere. And people need to see that.
What about outside of labor, do you have any hobbies?
I like crafting, mostly basic carpentry or do-it-yourself home stuff. And I like to make gifts for people.
Do you have an example?
I’ve made pillows for friends with the letter of their first name. For Valentine’s Day I made personalized gifts for my family using a wood burnisher. I burned their names or a message into a heart. For my mom I made a wooden photo collage board from my baby to her where she can change out different photos. And my husband and I remodeled our kitchen on our own and built an island and put down new floors and painted cabinets. (laughs) I’m the project manager and do the cutting and design because I have the patience to map it all out and measure everything. My husband does the heavy lifting.
You recently had a kid, what world do you hope for them to grow up in?
One where we’re not excited about celebrating firsts. Not the “first woman” or the “first Black person” or “first person of color” — these things need to be the norm. Where there’s the expectation that people of color can achieve things and be in these positions and that she’s not confronted with microaggressions as a response to her existence and success.
That may be a lofty goal for the next 20-25 years given the long history of our country. But the fact that even people who aren’t necessarily fighting for racial justice recognized how disrespectfully Ketanji Brown Jackson was treated during her confirmation hearing shows that more people are opening their eyes to some of the problems.