By admin 
I’ve spent almost seven years working emergency department security at Kaiser Permanente’s Sacramento Medical Center. My job is to walk the halls and make sure patients and staff are safe. Sometimes that means being the person who sits with someone who’s in crisis, at their worst moment, and helping them find their way back to calm.
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I didn’t go to school for this job. I was an English major, but I never finished my four-year degree — health issues got in the way, and work had to come first. But I still read Greek mythology for fun, and I still believe in the power of a story told straight.
So when I hear a politician give a speech about “the working class” or “affordability,” I notice how they tell the story. And to me, it often feels like there is distance, instead of lived experience.
Our elected officials of both parties tend to paint a general picture with statistics about wages, housing and inflation, but they don’t really capture the pain, shame, struggle and frustration that working people feel. Watch the California Legislature debate affordability, and you’ll get housing bond numbers, insulin prices, minimum wage comparisons. While the data is accurate, the testimonies lack personal narratives, names and stories. It’s as if the struggles are an abstraction kept — intentionally or not — at a distance.
I make $29.15 an hour. I’ve used CalFresh to buy my food and collected unemployment to pay my bills. As security, I’m one of the lowest-paid people in the building I protect, even though the whole hospital depends on us. I’ve had to fight, alongside my union, for pay that keeps up with what things actually cost.
I know what it is to do the math on rent before you do the math on anything else. So I don’t need a briefing on economic anxiety. I’m living it, and so is nearly everyone I work with — the nurses, cleaning staff and folks in the cafeteria. We all do this job because we care about people. But caring doesn’t pay rent.
Watching our leaders at both the state and federal levels try to connect with people like me, I have learned that talking points and big words don’t work. You can call what’s happening corporate greed or whatever sounds good on cable news. Most people aren’t going to stop and parse that word.
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I feel frustrated when politicians talk about workers instead of to us. This past presidential election, I watched people ask why Black men weren’t voting a certain way, while Black men from my own union were out canvassing every day. Nobody was asking us. They were talking about us. It’s the same reason I tell the medical staff I work with: if you want my respect, learn my name. Don’t tell me I’m essential and then treat me like I’m invisible the second the crisis passes.
That’s why I think the #Listen2Workers campaign, which my union is part of, is doing something politicians usually miss. It launched this year as a partnership between End Poverty in California (EPIC) and SEIU California, starting with essential workers like homecare and childcare workers, janitors and security staff. EPIC has spent years traveling the state holding listening sessions with people in poverty, work that helped lead to the country’s largest baby bond program and a wave of guaranteed income pilots.
The idea behind #Listen2Workers is simple: put a legislator in a room, one-on-one, with an actual worker, and ask them to listen, not campaign, and then share the conversation and act on what they heard. Politicians who skip the listening step don’t just miss the point, they miss the people who might show up for them at election time. If your platform is supposed to be about the people, you have to actually talk to the people and hear what they’re saying.
I don’t think my dreams are complicated. I want stability and safety. Just the basic dignity of knowing I have a roof over my head and I get to go home and rest under it.
What I want from Sacramento and Washington isn’t a better sentence, it’s a better habit: showing up, listening and then doing something about what they heard.
Jameel Hunt is a security officer and SEIU member at Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento. He is a participant in the #Listen2Workers campaign
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