Key officials backed Johnson early on, helped build his support and provided crucial money and volunteers.
Brandon Johnson rallies with SEIU Local 73 President Dian Palmer and other union members as they announce their endorsement of his campaign last November.
Months later, Johnson would announce his candidacy. And the rest-is-history part — his unlikely rise from a little-known progressive among nine candidates to mayor-elect of the U.S.’s third-largest city — seems unlikely to have happened without local Black labor leaders like Palmer who supported his endeavor and whose unions propelled his candidacy with money, support and volunteers.
As Palmer considered who she and her union might back this cycle, she began to study Johnson: the work he’d done, his answers to tough questions and even how he moved to see if he had a “mayoral way.” While SEIU and CTU have been aligned for many years on progressive issues, the relationship in the past has mostly been about supporting one another’s specific union plans, and historically it revolved less around a singular candidate, Kelley told the Tribune. That changed eight years ago.
Erica Bland-Durosinmi, executive vice president of the regional SEIU Healthcare chapter that includes Illinois, joins others as they rally for voting rights in 2022. “We know that Black people in unions tend to do better, they tend to make significantly more than Black people that aren’t in unions, they have greater benefits, so we are excited to have one of our own elected,” Kelley said.
Being connected to unions wasn’t popular among everyone. In former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, Johnson faced a foe whose financial backing was more centered in theVallas also got union support, more typically from the trades and, notably, the local Fraternal Order of Police. And he spoke to fears that a Johnson win would give CTU outsized influence at City Hall and that he would not be looking out for the interests of taxpayers or the business sector.
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