How Labor Beat City Hall
Published: Sep 15, 2011
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Photo / Laurel leff
Gwen Mills was on her way to another precinct when she noticed volunteers lingering in front of Frank Douglass’ home. Polls would close in fewer than four hours, and there was a party machine to defeat.
Mills (pictured in top photo), a 37-year-old union organizer who has quietly developed a reputation as a top campaign strategist, was racing around New Haven keeping tabs on 15 Democratic Party primary elections at once Tuesday. The union she works for—UNITE HERE, whose locals represent Yale’s blue-collar and pink-collar workers, its graduate students and two other unions—had recruited or backed candidates for alderman in all those races in a bid to take on candidates backed by City Hall, and try to shake up New Haven’s strong-mayor one-party government in the process.
The effort wasn’t expected to produce a lot of victories. And now in Dwight’s Ward Two, she didn’t like what she saw.
The volunteers, a mix of union workers, community activists and Yale students, were enjoying a block party atmosphere at the corner of Elm and Orchard. They were supposed to be helping Douglass win the primary for ward aldermen. Instead they gobbled freshly-prepared fried dough (savory with tomato sauce and sweet with sugar and cinnamon) and grooved to a blast of Jill Scott on 94.3 WYBC.
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