Issued September 25, 2026

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 25, 2026

At historic Carver Museum, hundreds of workers from across the country gathered to activate SEIU’s Money, Power, Respect program and carry forward Phoenix’s history of multiracial organizing

PHOENIX, AZ — Hundreds of workers and union leaders from across the country gathered in Phoenix this week as Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President April Verrett called on working people to organize across race, industry and geography to win Money, Power and Respect.

Speaking Wednesday at the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center — the former Phoenix Union Colored High School, which opened 100 years ago this month — Verrett rooted SEIU’s organizing program in a history of Black, Latino, Native, Asian American and immigrant communities who resisted efforts to exclude and divide them.

“The story of Phoenix is a story about people who were told what they were worth, and who organized to write a different ending,” said Verrett.

Verrett recounted how Black families challenged segregation in Phoenix schools; how Native communities survived efforts to erase their languages, cultures and connection to the land; and how Mexican American families organized boycotts and alternative schools when their children were not being heard.

She also connected Phoenix to the broader history of multiracial worker organizing across the West. In 1965, Filipino farmworkers led by Larry Itliong launched the Delano grape strike. Mexican farmworkers joined them days later, building a movement across racial lines. By 1972, that movement had reached Arizona, where farmworkers gathered at Phoenix’s Santa Rita Center during a 24-day fast and Dolores Huerta answered those who doubted they could win with the words that would become a movement cry: “Sí, se puede.”

“Workers whom growers had historically tried to pit against one another chose instead to stand together — and together, they helped build a movement,” Verrett said.

That history, Verrett argued, carries directly into the choices facing working people now.

She pointed to SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign, where immigrant and Black workers organized together rather than allowing employers to divide them, as an example of the solidarity necessary to build worker power today.

“They refused to let employers divide immigrant workers from Black workers who had historically held those jobs,” Verrett said. “Because the movement understood — if the employers could convince workers to fight each other, the employers would win.”

The two-day Phoenix gathering brought together workers from across SEIU — including airport workers, healthcare workers, janitors, security officers and public sector workers — to organize around the union’s Money, Power, Respect program.

SEIU is mobilizing one million members in more than 30 states and the District of Columbia and investing $100 million this cycle in a worker-led program designed to build power beyond a single election. In her address, Verrett emphasized that the investment itself is not the source of that power.

“The money isn’t the power. You are the power,” Verrett told workers.

Verrett called for a worker majority built across race and background — one in which Black, Latino, AAPI, white, immigrant, Native and LGBTQ workers recognize that their ability to win is tied to one another.

“They are counting on us to turn on each other instead of standing together,” Verrett said. “But we’re not going to give them that satisfaction. We’re going to do what workers have always done. We’re going to organize. We’re going to fight. We’re going to win.”

Verrett closed where she began: with Carver.

After the segregated school closed and the building was eventually abandoned, former students organized to preserve its history. In 1996, the Phoenix Monarchs Alumni Association raised $300,000 and purchased the property from the same school district that had once operated it as a segregated school.

“A building constructed because somebody else had the power to decide where Black children could learn eventually belonged to the very people it was built to oppress,” Verrett said. “If that isn’t Money, Power, Respect, I don’t know what is.”

“That’s the lesson working people have proven generation after generation: We are not powerless when we have each other.”