MSEA Member Robin Upton-Sukeforth Running for State House in Litchfield
Longtime union activist and retired Maine Service Employees Association (MSEA) member and staffer Robin Upton-Sukeforth of Litchfield is running the Maine Legislature in House District 56, which includes the towns of Litchfield, Monmouth and Wales. Upton-Sukeforth will face incumbent Rep. Randall Greenwood (R-Wales), who has a 10% score on the Maine AFL-CIO’s Working Families Legislative Scorecard. Greenwood also co-sponsored a union busting right-to-work for less bill last year. Upton-Sukeforth said she is running for the Maine House because she doesn’t believe that the working class is represented by the current incumbent.
“[Rep. Greenwood] has voted against a lot of things that I stand for, such as universal healthcare, universal childcare, fully funding education, and labor issues such as public sector collective bargaining rights,” said Upton-Sukeforth. “I feel that the rights of his mainly working-class constituents have not been represented and I think it's time to put forth a working-class agenda at the state level.”
Upton-Sukeforth grew up in central Maine in the 1960s and 70s. She and her five siblings were raised by a strong, single mother who didn’t put up with nonsense from bullies. She remembers how a local dairy farmer on the town council refused to plow the mile and a half stretch of road in front of the family’s house because her mother refused to sleep with him. Eventually her mother had to take the fight to the town council and won. The councilman finally plowed the road.
“I guess what I got from my mother is you stand up for your rights, no matter who they are and no matter how much power they have,” said Upton-Sukeforth. “People think they don't have power, but if they actually stand up with their neighbors or their union members, brothers and sisters, there is power there.”
She describes her mother as a “vagabond” and as the oldest daughter Upton-Sukeforth ran the household. Her younger siblings always called her “bossy,” but her mother raised her to be independent and to question authority. The first demonstration Upton-Sukeforth took part in was while she was at Cony High School. The students planned a walk-out to protest a school policy of holding midterms when the majority of the students were not planning to go to college. In the end the principal convinced them to call it off.
At the time, the Vietnam War was winding down and Upton Sukeforth got her first experience in politics volunteering on former Senator Brownie Carson’s campaign for Congress in 1972. She was inspired to support him because of his anti-war stances on US bombings in Cambodia and Laos. She originally wanted to become a lawyer, but ended up deciding to go into the social services field. Unfortunately, she had to drop out of college due to a health issue and went to work as a teacher at Head Start. But the pay was very low, so she decided to work at the former Associated Grocers warehouse in Augusta. The warehouse was unionized with the Teamsters. As an office worker she wasn’t allowed to join the union, but she got the same pay and benefits.
Then a recession hit and A.G. laid her off. After years of bouncing around from one temp job to another, Upton-Sukeforth finally landed a career working for the State of Maine. First, she worked in the child support division of the Department of Health and Human Services and then handled public assistance programs. Eventually, she was promoted to did disability determinations where she worked for eighteen years. During her first week at the Office of Family Independence, her steward pigeonholed her and asked her to take part in her first informational picket. As her children got older and entered high school, Upton-Sukeforth began to get more active in the union.
“Our director at DHHS actually told my shop steward that he was going to break the union,” she recalled. “The steward basically got burned out, so I stepped up so that I was beside her while she was fighting her battles and became a steward while she was a steward.”
Upton Sukeforth went on to serve in many capacities advocating for her coworkers and state retirees, including as a union steward; union chief steward; member of the Maine DHHS Labor-Management Committee; chapter delegate and alternate; chapter secretary; member of our finance committee; member of our Board of Directors and Executive Committee; and member of our political action committee, PASER, Political Action by Service Employees and Retirees. After
In 2018, Upton-Sukeforth retired from state government and began working as an MSEA labor rep. If elected, she says she would like to focus on improving social services and reducing caseloads for social workers so they can perform their jobs better.
“I have worked side by side with caseworkers to get a reasonable caseload and it keeps getting torpedoed by both Democratic and Republican administrations across the board,” said Upton-Sukeforth. “The state Office of Employee Relations’ interest is not employee relations. Their interest is management relations.”
She said if she is elected she would like to serve on either the Labor Committee or the Health and Human Services Committee. In addition, Upton-Sukeforth said wants to fix what she describes as “dysfunction” in the Department of Transportation and look at ways of improving student performance.