The Man Building the Bridge Between Labor Rights and Criminal Justice Reform

For the entirety of the Trump years, Garza has sat at the center of a loose progressive coalition in Texas, which draws together organized labor, civil and immigrants rights groups, and leftist political groups, all quietly doing the grassroots work of pulling a historically reactionary state into the future. The fact that Texas is now thought of as a plausible swing state during presidential election cycles can be traced back in large part to years of organizing by this loose-knit web of advocates. For Garza, success in electoral politics comes only as a result of this issue-based organizing, and never vice versa. 

“What we know in the state of Texas is that historically, people don’t vote here. Because when they do, they don’t see any meaningful difference in their lives,” he says. ​“What we have found is that when you talk to people about the issues, when you show them that they can win on the issues, those wins build on themselves.” 

This fundamental approach is familiar to labor organizers, but can be alien to professional political functionaries who tend to view all policy successes as merely instrumental to electoral wins. When Garza decided to run for DA, labor unions who had worked with him while he was at Workers Defense Project knew that he would bring that organizing approach with him into office. 

One of the unions that endorsed his campaign was Local 520 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, whose 1,500 members work on large commercial and industrial projects. Ryan Pollock, the union’s lead organizer, got to know Garza when he was fighting alongside them for paid sick leave in Austin. (Among the accomplishments of Workers Defense Project is that it’s widely praised by local unions, whereas many worker centers face a touchy relationship with unions who worry about any power being won on behalf of non-union workers.) ​“He’s a true working-class hero. That’s what we need in Austin, instead of this woke liberal bullshit,” Pollock says. ​“We’ve seen our city grow and flourish, and all this wealth coming in. The residents that live here and built that wealth, they’re getting edged out and exploited. We see somebody who understands where the working people of Austin are coming from, in a position like that, as a big win in this battle for our city.” 

Garza’s platform in the DA’s race included a slew of fundamental reforms: ending prosecutions for minor drug possession, pursuing restorative justice programs, cracking down on police misconduct, a blanket ban on seeking the death penalty, and other measures often sought by progressive DAs across the country. But when you ask his supporters where his experience with labor rights and economic justice will be most valuable, they tend to zero in on the issue of ending cash bail — another one of Garza’s platform planks. 

“We know he’s going to be prioritizing issues like bail reform, that have an incredibly detrimental effect on working folks in particular,” says Mimi Marziani, the president of the Texas Civil Rights Project and the leader of Garza’s transition team. ​“Because of the deep reliance on cash bail, you literally have a situation where two people can be accused of the very same crime — but just because one person has means and the other doesn’t, one person goes back to their family, goes back to their job, goes back to their life.” Cash bail is perhaps the clearest example of the criminalization of poverty, and the best demonstration of the fact that the line between ​“labor issues” and ​“criminal justice issues” dissolves when you look closely enough. If you can’t post bail, after all, you’re likely to lose your job.

“For hundreds of years in this country, we have been told that what ​‘public safety’ is is locking up as many working-class people and communities of color as we can,” Garza says. ​“We know that’s a lie. What public safety is is a good job. What public safety is is access to health care, and good schools to send our children. What public safety is is stability.” It is a simple way of looking at the issue, but one that is exactly backwards from the standard American approach. Instead of assuming that individuals — ​”criminals” — cause instability, Garza accepts that the opposite is true. Instability of communities and individual lives, he says, produces crime. Ensuring people have good jobs and safe working conditions and fair pay and protection from state harassment, therefore, are first order public safety goals. In this sense, Garza has a perfect resume to become district attorney. 

For the progressive groups in Texas like Workers Defense Project that see deep organizing as the long path to progress, seeding members of their ranks into elected positions is a natural step. Garza and his allies are confident that he can make his agenda a reality in Travis County. But the larger project of transforming the entire (still red) state will be a long, hard path — one that now falls to a movement that has spent the past four years in a pitched battle against a governor seeking to suppress the vote, and a White House pursuing vindictive policies against immigrants. 

“The Trump administration has both energized and exhausted our social justice movement,” says Mimi Marziani. ​“But I think that it has awakened a lot of people to issues that came long before Trump… and it has created conditions where we can have conversations about policy that did not exist five years ago.” 

The fact that a person like Jose Garza can now sweep into power as a top law enforcement official is a product of that awakening. He cites, as his own motivation, both a sense of disappointment in where Austin was at the end of the Trump years, and a sense of hope about the type of change that lay waiting to happen there. 

“The injustice that working people feel on the job when they can’t organize for better wages and better working conditions is the same injustice that communities of color feel on their streets,” Garza says. ​“It all flows from the same imbalanced power structure.” His job titles keep changing. But the job itself remains the same.