Ubben Posse Fellow Interviews: Senator Laphonza Butler
The Jeff Ubben Posse Fellows Program awards five exceptional Posse Scholars $10,000 each and the chance to spend 4-6 weeks during the summer shadowing and learning from a major industry leader. The interview below with former U.S. Senator for California Laphonza Butler was conducted by Posse Scholar Momore Del-Davidson, now in her junior year at the University of Virginia, who worked with Senator Butler as a 2024 Jeff Ubben Posse Fellow. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
MOMORE: Tell me about when you were a kid. What activities were you into when you were in middle school and high school?
SENATOR LAPHONZA BUTLER: I grew up in a small town, Magnolia, Mississippi. I’m the youngest of three in our nuclear family, and I have six half siblings. In middle school and high school, I played basketball, and I spent a lot of time with my family, with my brothers, trying not to be the only girl who got left behind.
In high school, when my father died, I saw my mom become a single parent overnight. I think watching her overcome challenges is probably what fueled me to continue to pursue my education, even though I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.
Were there any family sayings that stuck with you, from your childhood?
There’s so many because we have a lot of them in the South. One thing my mom would always say is, “You don’t have any friends; you have associates.” It was because her lived experience was one of letdown, hurt, and disappointment. She always worked to prepare us for disappointment that might be around the corner, but she also taught us to rely on each other. And so, my two brothers and I are extremely close. We learned later in life how to be friends with people, but we learned that our base friendship started between the three of us.
Also, she would always say, “You don’t have to go to school, to work, to wherever, but you got to get out of here.” She never let us make excuses for ourselves in any task that was in front of us. “There’s always something to do. Go do it!”
What was your first job, and what was an early leadership or life lesson you learned from it that changed the way you do things?
My very first job was in customer service. It was one of those early satellite companies for T.V. I worked after school from 3 pm to 11 pm. Since people had time to call after work hours, I’d get everyone’s feelings between the hours of 6 and 10 pm, particularly in the customer service space. I learned that everyone wants to be listened to, the importance of people feeling like they were heard, that their voice mattered, and that you needed to listen in the most authentic way possible. It’s not enough to just have a seat at the table. I have an open-door policy and ask: What are you actively doing to ensure that people can be heard and not just feel heard?
How did you get involved with SEIU and what was the most challenging part of your work as the President?
SEIU is the Service Employees International Union and United Long-term care workers. This is a long way of saying that we represented workers in the space of providing long-term care. I worked for mostly women and women of color in the state of California who were caregivers for seniors and people living with disabilities. The hardest part of my work as President was getting the rest of the structures of government that make decisions to fund this work, whether through Medicaid or Medicare, to see these women and these caregivers as healthcare workers and as an essential part of our healthcare system.
I was President of that Union at the time where we were going through a transformation in our healthcare system with the deployment of the Affordable Care Act and all its regulations and rules. This was a time when our healthcare system was being designed to focus on prevention as opposed to just disease management. I spent a lot of time, energy, and effort thinking about our healthcare system through a lens of prevention and the role that these workers played with the most expensive part of our healthcare system: people who are elderly and people who are living with disability. If you’re a home care worker and your job is to manage the diet and nutrition exercise of someone who’s in their 80s, what would it mean for the care continuum if that home care worker was actually trained, was actually a part of the healthcare delivery team, could talk with the doctor and the nurse and the pharmacist about nutrition or habits about medication compliance. Doing that work was a precursor to where our healthcare delivery system is trying to evolve.
Recognizing not only the payment incentives for prevention but also all those characteristics or behaviors that can minimize those diseases to being a part of the care. It really was a time in my career where I went from being a traditionally defined labor organizer, working on wages and working conditions, questioning how we take on the boss, to really seeing workers as whole people and understanding that they needed a Union, an organization that they trusted that had credibility, that had power to work.
SEIU was your first job out of college.
I started working in the labor movement two weeks after I finished my undergraduate degree. My dad always told me that I was going to be a lawyer. At that time, I was taking the LSAT to plan for law school and drafting all the law school application essays. As I prepared for law school, I would start to question whether I wanted to be a lawyer or was I just doing it because my father had wanted me to. As I examined that question, I learned I didn’t have a satisfactory answer, and I didn’t want to waste money that my momma didn’t have going to law school. When I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted to commit my life to doing it, it just so happened that as I was packing up for graduation, I found a flyer from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations that had been given to me two years prior in my constitutional law class. My journey, I am convinced, was one that was designed not by myself.
My frame of reference for social justice was not the labor movement. Growing up in Mississippi, that was not the place where I saw people who looked like me find community. And so, it wasn’t as if I was bound and determined that I was going to be a labor organizer, it just came together. It came together in a way that guided my footsteps. I started working on organizing campaigns. My first campaign was in Milwaukee, Minnesota; I was a traveling, homeless, full-time employed organizer. I was getting my mail sent to my mom’s house. I learned how to be an organizer and learned how to be a leader. I wanted to take on more and have more responsibility. I wanted to work for women like my mom, who herself had been a home care worker, who herself had worked in a nursing home, who herself was an untrained security officer, and at SEIU, and I got the opportunity to do all of that.
The difference between those workers and my mom was that she was never going to get a chance to be a member of a union living in Mississippi. I had been given a gift, SEIU, that my mother would never have. And so, my job, my obligation, was to make sure that that gift was given to women like my mom all over the country. And I wound up being able to do that deepest in California.
What are some similarities between your roles as CEO for Emily’s List and as a Senator?
Every role that I have had goes back to what I learned being an organizer, even my role as CEO for Emily’s List. The fundamental tools and skills of being an organizer are described in organizing conversation in the following way: One is getting in the door. You’re an organizer and you’re knocking on somebody’s door who does not expect you to be knocking on their door, and you actually want to come in and talk to them about their job. You better be ready to have a strong way of making that first introduction. It’s about the initial connection in your bid to not take no for an answer.
Second is about asking good questions and being prepared to listen for the answer. In whatever role I am in, I am not coming from a place where I assume I know what the answer is. Sometimes the answer is less important than the question. I am more focused on asking the right question than I am on knowing the right answer. Most of the time I know what the answer is. The question is the tool that you use to build the connection.
Next part of being an organizer is about agitation. How do you take the answers that you’ve heard that you carefully listen to and inspire the desire for change. For example, someone shares: “I’m mad because my boss didn’t treat me right when my child was going through cancer.” I now have to help them appreciate that forming a union is a way to make sure that that doesn’t happen again, or it doesn’t happen to the next person that’s coming behind them, and that joining together with coworkers is the way to build the power necessary to be an equal with an employer, and that to truly take this on, I’ve got to talk to them now. I’ve got to learn more. I’ve got to dig deeper in terms of what it felt like for them.
My career path has been circuitous—from starting as an organizer to being the president of the largest union in the largest state in our country, to working in corporate spaces at Airbnb, to being a consultant, to working with the Vice President. The foundation of my path is about understanding how everyday people can choose to do extraordinary things, and when they choose to do it together.
