Episode 222: No More Off Years, It’s Always On
Sometimes when you look around, things can feel insurmountable but that is why L. Joy is here! She continues to give us the tools and strategies we need to work to make change. L. Joy brings EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to the front of the class for a far ranging conversation that drops jewels of history and information for our civics tool box so we can get to work.
Homework:
Learn more about EMILY’s List work to elect Democratic pro-choice women up and down the ballot and across the country with a goal of fighting for our rights and our communities https://emilyslist.org/
Read about the National Labor Relations Act on the National Labor Relations Board’s website https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/national-labor-relations-act
L. Joy has discussed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) before https://www.sundaycivics.org/episodes/episode176 now read about what New York State is doing- EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT ADVANCES TO NEW YORK VOTERS IN NOVEMBER 2024 https://www.nyclu.org/en/press-releases/equal-rights-amendment-advances-new-york-voters-november-2024
Take time to examine the political landscape in your municipality, state and with the federal government.
Extra Credit Read “Time to Fight: How the Powell memo convinced big business it was losing American hearts and minds” by Nitish Pahwa in Slate about the Lewis Powell memo to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/08/lewis-powell-memo-chamber-commerce.html
Our Guest:
Laphonza Butler is the president of EMILYs List. As a leader in Democratic politics, campaign strategy, and the labor movement for two decades, she has dedicated her life to empowering women and supporting them in finding their voice, and using it to make meaningful change.
Prior to joining EMILYs List, Butler served as Director of Public Policy and Campaigns in North America for Airbnb. She also was a partner at SCRB Strategies, a political consulting firm where she was a strategist for candidates running up and down the ballot and a senior advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
With nearly 20 years in the labor movement, Butler has served as the president of the biggest union in California, and the nation’s largest homecare workers union, SEIU Local 2015. She was elected to this position at just 30 years old, one of the youngest to take on this role. As president, Butler was the leading voice, strategist, and architect of efforts to address pay inequity for women in California and a top advocate for raising the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour – the first state in the nation to do so, benefiting millions of working women in low wage jobs. That effort also gave hundreds of thousands of home workers access to paid time off. She also served as an SEIU International Vice President and President of the SEIU California State Council.
Throughout her career, Butler has been highly regarded as a strategist working to elect Democratic women candidates in political offices across California and nationally. A long-time supporter of Kamala Harris in her California runs, Butler was a key leader in Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign. She served as a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in California during the primary and general elections. Most recently, Butler was a campaign operative behind the campaign to make the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors all-women for the first time in its history with the election of Holly Mitchell.
She has been a member of the University of California Board of Regents and a member of the board of directors for the Children’s Defense Fund and BLACK PAC.
Laphonza grew up in Magnolia, MS, and attended one of the country’s premier HBCUs, Jackson State University. She lives in Maryland with her partner Neneki Lee and their daughter Nylah.
