Introducing Our New Campaigns Director Arthur Phillips

Please welcome the Maine AFL-CIO’s new Campaigns Director, Arthur Phillips! Arthur comes to us from the Maine Center for Economic Policy where he worked for four years on labor policies to advance economic justice for working class Mainers. Prior to joining MECEP, he worked for seven years as a researcher and campaign strategist with the hospitality workers' union UNITE HERE.

Originally from the North Shore of Massachusetts, Phillips moved to Portland with his family when he was in high school. After graduation, he spent time living in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba where he volunteered, taught English and studied Spanish in 2005. At the time, the country was going through political turmoil as crippling protests led to the resignation of President Carlos Mesa over his handling of the nation’s natural resources.

In 1997, the World Bank made privatization of Cochabamba’s public water supply a condition of the country receiving aid for water development. As a result, a company led by the multinational corporation Bechtel took over its water rights and jacked up rates by as much as 300 percent, forcing Bolivian families to spend one-fifth of their income on water.A law passed by the Bolivian government even required a permit to collect rain water.

Protests against the privatization scheme erupted between 1999 and 2000, leading to a violent crackdown by police. Eventually the protests forced Bechtel to withdraw from the country. What became known as the "Cochabamba Water War" was followed by more protests in 2005 when indigenous Bolivians demanded a share of the nation’s natural gas wealth that was going into the pockets of a wealthy white, European descended elite. The protests paved the way for the election of indigenous union organizer Evo Morales to the Presidency.

“It was a very influential moment in my life where I was kind of witnessing history happening really quickly and seeing a broader spectrum of political possibilities than what was on offer in the US at that time,” said Phillips.  “And learning more about the history of expropriation and colonial and neo-colonial extraction in Latin America.”

The experience inspired him to study Latin American history and research the impact of the Canadian mining industry on the region at McGill University in Montreal. After graduation, Phillips moved to New York City and worked several jobs in food service and worked on documentary films before landing a position researching US foreign policy on Latin America at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a pro-labor think tank.

“Uprisings in the US, including the Occupy movement and the organizing against [Wisconsin Governor] Scott Walker's war on unions in Wisconsin, really inspired me to try to find a way to put the skills that I had learned around research and economics toward building power,” said Phillips.

He took a job doing strategic research for UNITE HERE because he was inspired by the union’s ambitious organizing and workplace struggles. Working on his first campaign in Los Angeles, Phillips was immediately thrown into efforts to organize airport catering workers at Flying Food Group. The workers had a very militant organizing committee and once they were able win union recognition, they leveraged that power workers built in LA to win a fair process to unionize other kitchens around the country. For the next six years, Phillips continued to coordinate new organizing campaigns across the country in college and university dining services, casinos and other corporate settings.

After seven years at UNITE HERE, he and his wife wanted to move back to Maine to be closer to family. He worked remotely from Maine for the first year, but he wanted to do work that was more connected to where he lived, so he took a position at MECEP. He said he pursued the opportunity to work at the Maine AFL-CIO to put some of the skills he developed over the years to come back to the labor movement and bring more working class people into the political process in order to influence the policies that impact us.

As our Campaigns Director, Phillips will coordinate the Contract for Maine’s Working Class Campaign, which aims to bring workers into the political process and shape a labor led platform to boost wages, strengthen retirement security and lower the cost of living.

“Primarily, this is about getting the expertise of working people in terms of identifying what their main priorities are and what their biggest needs are and working together to develop solutions to those problems and putting together a platform that responds to what we care about most and want to see the state respond to,” he said.

The campaign will incorporate programs like the Maine AFL-CIO’s Worker Candidate Training to recruit and train union members to run for office, organizing people in legislative directs and influencing elected officials to support their priorities outlined in the Contract for Maine’s Working Class. The goal, said Philips, will be to combat pessimism and cynicism by helping workers understand the value of participating in politics and how we can “make real material changes that benefit our lives.”

“I'm really excited about working with as many people as possible to move this work forward,” he said.  

If you want to introduce yourself to Arthur and welcome him aboard you can send him an email: arthur @ maineaflcio.org