A Class Speaker at Harvard

Mitchell’s current opponent, Ed Kelly, advertises himself as the son, grandson, brother, nephew, and cousin of firefighters, in a union where family connections count for a lot. In 1997, he joined the Boston Fire Department, which has been described as the city’s “whitest public safety agency,” despite its now majority minority population. Four years later, Kelly was among the hundreds of out-of-town firefighters dispatched to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks.

Kelly was also a first responder to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. He was elected president of the IAFF’s Boston local, then its twelve-thousand-member state federation, on whose behalf he did legislative lobbying. In 2015, his union sent “Edzo,” as he’s known, to the prestigious Harvard Trade Union Program, where fellow students chose him to be their class speaker.

Kelly’s dedication to fellow veterans has led, however, to controversial political endorsements and hiring decisions. Last year, in Massachusetts, he helped arrange firefighter backing for a former police officer and two-time Donald Trump supporter running for state representative on Cape Cod. West Barnstable, Massachusetts, Republican Steven Xiarhos, who lost a son in Afghanistan, defeated Jim Dever, a labor-backed Democrat who works for NAGE SEIU, one of the state’s larger public employee unions. A Massachusetts labor leader I spoke to calls that IAFF intervention “a disaster” and describes Kelly as someone who has “gotten a break and a half just to end up where he is now in the union.”

After his election as IAFF secretary-treasurer in 2016, Kelly hired former Green Beret major Mathew Golsteyn, who served with his brother in Afghanistan. A month later, Golsteyn admitted to committing a war crime during a Fox News interview and was charged with murder by the Army. This made him a conservative cause célèbre and a candidate for White House clemency.

In late 2019, Trump pardoned Golsteyn, who then joined the president onstage at a Florida fundraiser that generated $3.5 million for Republican reelection efforts. This was eight months after the IAFF, under Schaitberger’s leadership, had made an early endorsement of Joe Biden’s candidacy. Golsteyn remains at his $236,000-a-year union headquarters post as Kelly’s chief of operations.

Kelly’s relationship with Schaitberger worsened last year due to his own covert maneuvering to replace the IAFF president when his term of office ended this winter. Conservative news outlets like the Washington Free Beacon and the Wall Street Journal ran embarrassing articles about Schaitberger’s pension benefits and handling of union funds, based on records obtained from Kelly’s office.

In an interview with the Intercept, Brian Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters, described these leaks as a “a veiled coup, a power struggle, aimed at the IAFF leadership,” which threatened to tarnish its organizational reputation. To Kelly critics like Bryan Jeffries, head of the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona, they also seemed to be the work of “some very right-leaning elements within our union.” Instead of running for reelection, Schaitberger decided to retire, leaving the field open for a contested race for the union’s top job, which pays $371,000 a year, five or six times more than the average firefighter earns.

Local Endorsements

Because of the pandemic, the IAFF held a virtual convention in late January, which enabled many more of its small locals to participate. About 70 percent of all IAFF affiliates have fewer than fifty members, but the union’s internal politics tend to be dominated by its bigger city locals. The 3,323 delegates now casting weighted ballots, based on their local’s membership size, have been wooed online and in person by both the Kelly and Mitchell campaigns. Neither candidate has been endorsed by a majority of IAFF locals.

Kelly has his strongest support in his native northeast, although after union officials in Philadelphia endorsed him without sufficient rank-and-file input, angry members forced a revote that revealed nearly equal support for the two candidates. In California, Mitchell is backed by the thirty-thousand-member state firefighters organization, plus locals in LA, Long Beach, Anaheim, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Hayward, Milpitas, San Jose, and Sacramento, and firefighters employed by the federal government on West Coast military bases and in wilderness areas.

Both candidates have campaign websites showcasing their latest endorsement videos. But Mitchell has twice as many Facebook followers as Kelly, and he posts links to substantive discussions, conducted via Zoom, with rank-and-filers around the country. Kelly has rejected Mitchell’s repeated demand for a “face-to-face” debate, despite no shortage of issues to discuss. While firefighters have won good pay and benefits in parts of the country with strong public-sector bargaining laws, those working in some “right-to-work” states lag far behind. Many are able to retire early but then lack affordable pre-Medicare-age health coverage. As the New York Times reported recently, “the safety of firefighters has become an urgent concern amid the worsening effects of climate change, which bring rising temperatures that prime the nation for increasingly devastating fires.”

Adding to that threat is on-the-job exposure to carcinogenic chemicals in the protective equipment that firefighters have worn for years; in 2019, cancer caused 75 percent of all active-duty firefighter deaths. During his campaign, Mitchell has made such occupational hazards and better mental health coverage a major focus. And, his backers believe, he will be a far better strategist in the union’s upcoming fight to protect fire services from a cascade of COVID-19-related state and local budget cuts.

A Toxic Workplace?

While some Mitchell supporters rate the contest as “neck and neck,” he is competing on tough electoral terrain. The workforce represented by the IAFF is more predominantly white and male than the US military and even local police forces. Fewer than 8 percent of all US firefighters are African American, and few have risen, like Mitchell, to leadership positions. Even in Canada, where the IAFF has 23,000 members, an increasingly diverse city like Calgary (which has a Muslim mayor) has few women firefighters, and its black or indigenous ones have been subjected to years of hazing, harassment, and racial slurs.

Although the IAFF backed Biden last year, one official from another union who spoke at a firefighters national convention just a few years ago was warned beforehand that his audience was heavily Republican. When Mitchell himself addressed IAFF convention delegates during his 2018 bid to become Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee, he criticized his home state for having the highest African American incarceration rate in the country. It was not a big applause line before a largely white crowd otherwise sympathetic to his political advocacy for the union and its job-related causes.

Among the many IAFF members who’ll be rooting for Mitchell during the March 4 vote count are fellow trailblazers in the union. Shon Buford became the first African American president of 1,800-member Local 798 in San Francisco two years ago. He believes the IAFF needs new leadership that “understands the needs of big and small locals, has the capacity to lead us into the future, and make us a united front again.” In Georgia, Mitchell supporter Andrea Hall became the first ever African American female fire captain in South Fulton, Georgia, and then was elected president of her local. On January 20, she impressed millions of US presidential inauguration viewers by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while providing her own American Sign Language version while she spoke.

Similar dexterity in addressing multiple audiences has been a key part of Mahlon Mitchell’s own past success as a labor and political activist. It remains to be seen whether it will get him to the top of the union ladder this time around.