As seems to be a running trend in the days since the election, Alaska labor leaders see plenty of silver linings in the state’s election results despite the uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system helped deliver bipartisan majorities in both chambers. Members and labor leaders say this will help prioritize investments in working-class issues like education funding, child care and retirement reform. Voters also approved a $15 minimum wage and guaranteed paid sick leave.
“It was a referendum on education funding and pensions,” Anchorage Rep. Zack Fields, the Democrat set to chair the House Labor and Commerce Committee, said of the election results. He pointed to several legislative races where moderate, labor-friendly Republicans prevailed over conservative, party-aligned Republicans in races where spending heavily focused on recent fights over education and pension reform.
Both have been a significant issue in recent years in the Alaska Legislature. As the one-time pandemic money ran out, schools faced a financial cliff that forced school closures throughout the state. Legislators approved a permanent increase to per-student school funding, but that was ultimately defeated by Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his legislative allies.
Meanwhile, the Republican-led House largely ignored a growing push to restore pensions for public employees in Alaska. Alaska once had generous retirement and benefits to attract and retain employees, but they were cut back and eliminated in 2006. Now, Alaskan employees have a 401k-style retirement account and are not eligible for Social Security, which advocates say has played a significant role in a revolving door of state employees.
Instead of entertaining solutions, House Republicans focused much of their legislative efforts on advancing divisive culture-war-style issues like a ban on trans athletes.
Fields said Alaskans have had enough.
“Normal people want good schools, they want positions filled, and they don’t want this partisan stuff that is crazy even for many Republicans,” he said.
Anchorage Democratic Sen. Löki Tobin, the returning chair of the Senate Education Committee, sees the session as a critical opportunity to put Alaska on a long-term path to success. She’s been frustrated by the year-to-year fights because they have generated major uncertainty, especially for schools and teachers.
“There’s a recognition if there was ever a time to walk and chew gum at the same time, now is it,” she said. “Education is not a left or right issue; it’s how we have a labor force. It doesn’t matter how much we talk about an energy transition unless we have the engineers and heavy equipment operators and the food service workers and all those other people who are required to make those industries hum.”
One of the significant uncertainties around education is Republicans’ plans to try to repeal the U.S. Department of Education and cut funding around those programs. Both Tobin and Fields said it would cause serious harm to the state’s schools but doubted such a dramatic change would actually come to pass.
Heidi Drygas, the executive director of the Alaska State Employees Association, said the uncertainty around a new Trump administration is real but shouldn’t dictate how Alaskans fight and advocate for themselves from the local to the national level.
“It’s not something that we can control,” she said of Trump and Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s tendency to veto issues. “You never know what can happen. You never know what he could do, so I just don’t want to move forward in that light, and I’m not going to let it get me down.”
She recalled that when it became apparent that Trump would win the election, her attention turned entirely to the state races and politics. She said that’s where progress on labor issues and Alaska’s general quality of life can and will be made.
“I’m really thrilled to see that there are coalitions in both the House and the Senate who are prioritizing like kind of bread and butter issues that are really important to certainly to the public employees that I represent, but also Alaskans in general,” she said. “Alaskans want a functional state government that serves the public well, and I think these coalitions will move the ball down the court.”
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
