[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 104 (Thursday, June 4, 2020)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E514]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          HONORING DAVID SNAPP

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. ANDY LEVIN

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, June 4, 2020

  Mr. LEVIN of Michigan. Madam Speaker, I rise to honor my dear friend 
and former colleague, Dave Snapp on the occasion of his retirement. I 
met Dave Snapp in the late summer of 1983 when I had just turned 23 
years old and we were trying to learn how to help nursing home workers 
organize for a better life with the Service Employees International 
Union. Thirty-seven years later, Dave is still at it, helping workers 
organize for dignity, voice and power in an America that suddenly deems 
them essential even while asking them to toil in poverty, in unsafe 
conditions, even under threat of deportation.
  After I left SEIU in 1988, Dave kept right on organizing. And he 
never stopped working for the labor movement. He played many roles for 
the union over the years. He has often been in the middle of the 
activities that have made SEIU so innovative. Dave has often served as 
a facilitator and organizer for the executive leadership of the union. 
He has been a scriptor and choreographer of conventions. He has 
organized strategic planning. He has conceived and undertaken special 
projects. He has helped drive long-term thinking to an extent and scope 
remarkable in the labor movement and, indeed, in other parts of the 
American political economy.
  Through it all, Dave has displayed a remarkable mix of traits that 
are rarely found rolled up in one person. Flat-out smarts. Intellectual 
curiosity. Practicality--a groundedness in how things might actually 
work in the real world. Maybe that's the health and safety guy in him. 
Humility. A willingness to speak truth to power and not to tell leaders 
what they want to hear, somehow without alienating them and indeed 
engendering their loyalty. A wry sense of humor, sometimes bleeding 
into bad jokes. Compassion and caring for his fellow travelers along 
the road to justice, person to person.
  How lucky I have been to have acquired Dave as an adopted-without-
permission big brother so many years ago and, I might add, to have 
acquired a big sister in his life partner, Carol Regan. That's the best 
two-for-one deal I ever got, all by signing up to help nursing home 
workers find a little power over their own work lives.
  Now Dave says he is laying down his tools. If we're honest, we often 
have mixed feelings about friends retiring as a reflection of our own 
mortality. But I have to admit, I can't think of anyone who has earned 
a bit of rest from relentless labor more richly than Dave Snapp. He 
always looked at work organically, as how best to organize something 
that needed to be accomplished, and thus seemed to own what he was 
doing so completely. Thank goodness he chose to labor on behalf of 
America's workers.
  Madam Speaker, happily, there is no retiring from adopted big 
brotherhood. I will continue to seek Dave's advice and counsel on 
life's journey. And to take inspiration from his example of doing 
things well for all the right reasons.

                          ____________________