Thank all of you for coming this evening to the AFL-CIO’s House of Labor to honor SEIU President April Verrett and to support the Labor Heritage Foundation. We were founded in 1983 as a non-profit organization to inspire workers and provide them with cultural and artistic tools to revitalize their unions. Our programs — The Great Labor Arts Exchange, the DC Labor Chorus, the Labor Film Fest, our weekly radio show, podcast and newsletter, the Joe Hill Award — your support of these programs will help us at LHF as we try to live up our reputation as being the art and soul of the labor movement. So on behalf of our board, our executive director, Chris Garlock, and our former executive director, Elise Bryant, welcome.
Tonight we honor a great labor leader — a transformative labor leader — President April Verrett of the Service Employees International Union, SEIU.
April was born on the South Side of Chicago. She was raised by her grandmother, a union steward with SEIU Local 46, who taught her to never stop dreaming. When April became an SEIU organizer — a position she held for nearly 20 years — she began to realize that dream through her work uplifting health care workers. “I want to do something,” she said, “to end poverty and poverty wage work in America”
In 2019, the Service Employees chose her to lead California’s long-term care workers union, Local 2015, which today is 400,000 strong — the largest union in the state. Describing herself as “a Chicago girl and a White Sox fan” her move to Los Angeles was a transformative moment in her life. It would also become transformative for California’s SEIU home care and nursing care members, the majority of whom are women and women of color, many of them immigrants.
As president of Local 2015 April led the fight for better pay and working conditions and an end to harassment and discrimination on the job. She helped to restore funding cuts to the state’s home care program and, during the COVID epidemic, she secured hazard pay and personal protective equipment for her members. She was appointed by Governor Newsome to important task forces on COVID and on Alzheimer’s prevention. Her passion for organizing was expressed in an interview when she told a reporter, “there is no greater group of workers to fight for than caregivers.”
There is a traditional Jewish saying that says “God gave us burdens, but he also gave us shoulders.” In California and today, as SEIU’s national president, April fights for the people who serve as the shoulders of our working class — our nation’s care workers, the caregivers for the elderly and the disabled. The people that do the work that makes all other work possible. April Verrett is their shero!
In 2022 April was elected as SEIU’s secretary-treasurer joining President Mary Kay Henry’s leadership team. And on May 20, 2024, at convention in Philadelphia, she made history when her members elected her president of the Service Employees International Union, choosing her to lead its two million members strong. In her acceptance speech she pledged to put racial and gender equality center stage and to build unprecedented worker power — a mission she described as “a glorious revolution.”
From A. Philip Randolph, the great labor and civil rights leader, who said “at the banquet table of life there are no reserved seats.”
From Shirley Chisholm the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black woman to run for president from a major political party who said “if they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
To April Verrett, the young organizer from Chicago, who became the president of the largest union in the AFL-CIO and who continues to rise — not from the ranks but with the ranks — the Labor Heritage Foundation is proud to present you with its 2026 Solidarity Forever Award.
— Remarks by Saul Schniderman, Chair, Labor Heritage Foundation on May 14, 2026, Washington, DC.
Labor art is not just a moment.
It’s workers across the country saying —
We’re done being invisible.
We’re done letting billionaires define our culture.
— April Verrett
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