Our First 2020 Primary Is In Arizona-- Meet Eva Putzova

Arizona's mammoth first district-- slightly bigger than Pennsylvania-- is centered on Flagstaff but is like a representation of the state of the whole state of Arizona. It includes the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, the suburbs south of Phoenix and north of Tucson, the huge a Navajo and Hopi reservations--and more native Americans than any other district in the country. It's a swing district with an R+2 PVI, where Trump beat Hillary 47.7% to 46.6%, but which is represented in Congress by an "ex"-Republican Blue Dog, Tom O'Halleran. O'Halleran is one of the most Trump-supporting Democrats. Blue America has been working on helping to recruit or support primary opponents to the four most Trump-supporting Dems in the House, Henry Cuellar (TX), Collin Peterson (MN), Josh Gottheimer (NJ) and Conor Lamb (PA). As of this week, we're also supporting the opponent to the 5th Trumpiest. Her name is Eva Putzova and she seems far more concerned with the positive platform she's crafted than with O'Halleran or any other candidates who may run in AZ-01. Her website lays out her 8 big issues:

• Medicare-for-All
• Tuition-free college education
• Indigenous rights
• Immigration overhaul
• Green New Deal
• No more wars
• Women's choice
• Worker's rights

Eva was born and raised in Slovakia, made Flagstaff, Arizona her home in 2000 and became a U.S. citizen in 2007. She started her professional career in the renewable energy sector and, in 2003, began working in higher education. During her 14-year tenure at Northern Arizona University she held a number of positions, including Director of Strategic Planning and Executive Director for Marketing and Strategic Communications. She was elected to the Flagstaff City Council in 2014. Today, she is a National Communications and Technology Director for Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, working to raise wages and improve working conditions for the country’s 13 million restaurant workers.

Eva and I spoke at great length this week and Blue America has officially endorsed her. I asked her about all the issues in her platform and was fascinated by what she had to say about workers rights because of her own experiences fighting in that area. Her website emphasizes themes that any progressive Democrat would say: "Over the last 30 years, wages have remained flat for most workers while corporate profits have soared. One reason for stagnant wages is the loss of workers’ bargaining power as labor unions have been decimated by corporate attacks. The other reason is the low federal minimum wage. I will support legislation to allow workers to more easily unionize and to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour." But the story behind the story is what made me ask her to write a guest post on the subject. Please give it a look below. If you like it and want to help get Eva into Congress click on the thermometer on the right and consider contributing to her campaign.


A Living Wage-- Guest Post
by Eva Putzova



After decades of stagnating wages and an inadequate federal minimum wage policy, communities around the country have been taking actions into their own hands. To raise wages in red states like Arizona, your only option is a ballot initiative. Republican lawmakers not only refuse to raise the minimum wage legislatively, they would prefer to get rid of it completely, taking us back to the era of total labor exploitation.

In 2016, in Flagstaff, Arizona, I led a local citizen initiative raising the minimum wage to $15, gradually increasing the subminimum tipped wage to the full minimum wage, and establishing local enforcement-- another key provision in states where your governor does not believe in enforcing the law against wage theft and corporate greed. Shortly after the local success in the 2016 election, the Koch outfit American Encore initiated a repeal of the voter-approved minimum wage law. They called their misleading amendment the “Sustainable Wages Act” and collected signatures to get it on the next ballot by simply lying to people. From the beginning, the biggest opposition to raising wages came from the restaurant industry because the local law finally increases the subminimum tipped wage. Living almost exclusively off tips forces the mostly female restaurant workforce to put up with inappropriate behavior from customers, managers, and co-workers.

At the same time when Flagstaff passed its One Fair Wage covering tipped workers under the same minimum wage rate rules as the rest of the workforce, so did voters in Maine. While Arizona and Flagstaff enjoyed the protections of the Voter Protection Act and initiatives can’t be overturned by legislative action, people in Maine were not so lucky. The National Restaurant Association, the “other” NRA, is a trade lobby that spends millions of dollars influencing legislation in order to keep wages low and uphold their greedy corporate agenda. The “other” NRA piloted a new lobbying tactic in Maine, fronting a fake grassroots group called the Restaurant Workers of America, in which white male servers from fine dining establishments argue against increasing their own wages. The astroturf group managed to get enough faux Democrats in the Maine legislature to overturn the people’s will.

In addition to astroturfing, the restaurant lobby buys legislators when they can-- as was the case recently in DC where the City Council repealed the voter-approved Initiative 77, or in Michigan, where legislators adopted the voter-initiated ballot measure rather than sending it out to the voters which would have tied their hands. They gutted the law in the lame duck session and left tipped workers way behind-- with $4.58 per hour by 2030 instead of $12 by 2022 that the Michigan voters petitioned for. Just this week, in New Jersey, legislators cut a deal with the Governor to raise the minimum wage to $15, carving out tipped workers and farmworkers, with the tipped wage going up from an embarrassing $2.13 to an insulting $5.13 in five years. All over the country, people support raising the minimum wage and raising the subminimum tipped wage. It’s the legislators who are behind.

The 2018 campaign in Flagstaff to repeal the minimum wage was in its final stages funded by other dark money shops-- America Revived and Market Freedom Alliance who worked hand in hand with the local Chamber of Commerce and a local Restaurant Association. While we may never know what they spent-- as their reporting is as shady as their donor base-- we estimate they outspent our local NO campaign protecting the minimum wage by a 4-to-1 margin. We ran a fearless campaign knocking on the doors, proving that organized people can defeat organized money. We protected the local law by a greater margin than we won initially in 2016. Thanks to Flagstaff voters (and a well-run defense campaign), $140 million will go every year to the pockets of workers instead of their corporate bosses.

It’s disturbing how so many of our so-called Democrats are willing to defy the will of the voters and support the subminimum tipped wage policy-- a policy that is nothing more than institutionalized gender and racial discrimination because more than 65 percent of restaurant workers are women and many are people of color. And yet, One Fair Wage has been in effect for decades in seven states-- California, Nevada, Oregon, Minnesota, Montana, Washington, and Alaska. These one-fair-wage states have half the rate of sexual harassment as the 43 states with subminimum tipped wages. In addition, they have higher restaurant sales per capita in the industry (proving that paying people well is good for the bottom line), higher job growth, and the same or higher tipping averages than the 43 states where tipped workers still get paid the subminimum wage rate.

What stands between workers and their ability to enjoy a decent life with a stable paycheck is too often just corporate greed enabled by a subservient legislature. But we can do better. I will fight for just, generous, and inclusive America as hard as I fought for Flagstaff workers against the Chamber allied with the Koch network and their dark money tentacles.