Donna Kelly-Yu, a member of Culinary Workers Union, Local 226, canvasses in a neighborhood near East Flamingo and Boulder Highway Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020. Yu was furloughed from her casino job but got a temporary job from the union to canvas before the election.
Sunday, Nov. 1, 2020 | 2 a.m.
Donna Kelly-Yu has lost count of how many homes she’s visited since she started canvassing on behalf of the Culinary Union this election season. But she’ll likely not easily forget the first house she approached Wednesday afternoon, when a man went on an angry tirade at the mention of Joe Biden’s name.
The Democratic presidential nominee was a “piece of (expletive)” who would be humiliated in a “landslide” come Tuesday, he exclaimed from the other side of the closed door.
Kelly-Yu apologized.
If the interaction — which she later described as the rudest she’s experienced while going door-to-door to talk with registered voters — left her shaken, she didn’t immediately show it.
Instead, Kelly-Yu looked at her tablet, found the next address on her list of registered voters to visit and walked over in her well-worn white sneakers.
The next stop was more welcoming, though the previous voter’s profanities grew louder as he’d stepped outside to chase away the union members: “Get the (expletive) out of here!”
“Go blue,” said the woman from the second home, noting that her household had already voted for Biden.
Kelly-Yu continued working in the golf course community in east Las Vegas. The streets were dotted with tidy front yards. Most of the homes displayed American flags.
That afternoon, Kelly-Yu was one of about 350 union members scattered across the valley, visiting homes of registered Democrats and nonaligned voters in one of the final pushes from the union to remind voters to cast their ballot, providing early voting information, and pitching Biden as worthy of their vote.
The canvassing union members, broken up in teams of three, all had been furloughed or laid off since mid-March from their resort jobs that haven’t come back the pandemic-related business shutdowns and now-enforced capacity limits. For Kelly-Yu, the canvassing position gives her an opportunity to receive a paycheck while she’s out of work as a dispatch butler at Caesars Palace.
Bethany Khan, communications director with Local 226, said the Culinary Union canvassers were being paid essentially the same wage and benefits as they had been earning at their regular jobs. While she did not give an exact figure, in 2019 she told the Sun that Culinary Union members working on the Strip made an average of $24 an hour when benefits were included.
As of this past week, about 50% of more than 60,000 Culinary Union members in Nevada were unemployed, said the organization’s Secretary-Treasurer Geoconda Arguello-Kline.
After Nov. 7, Kelly-Yu will go back on unemployment benefits if Caesars doesn’t summon her back to work, she said.
Kelly-Yu spoke about why she wholeheartedly supports Biden’s campaign.
Some five years ago, she said Wednesday, her family was out for dinner when one of her grandchildren mentioned that his teacher had taught the class the meaning of the word integrity and its spelling. Then 5-years-old, the boy went on to explain to the family that to him, it means “to do what’s right when no one is looking.”
Kelly-Yu described Biden as a good man with integrity. She grew emotional when she spoke about a lesson she learned from her mother before her death. She’d told her to “be a good girl, so, I have to be good.”
That might explain why she didn’t flinch at the man’s expletives. “Even when people are mean, I still try to be good to them, you know?” Kelly-Yu said.
Kelly-Yu has been a Culinary Union member for more than 20 years, spending the last decade at Caesars. She was on leave of absence when Nevada shut down the resorts, set to return in late April.
She waited weeks to receive unemployment benefits. Her husband was also furloughed from his part-time job at Caesars. They haven’t returned, but her husband’s Social Security checks and her temporary job as a political organizer have helped, though they’ve had to tighten their belts. They’ve put home repairs on hold unless they’re truly necessary. Early in the pandemic, they received a couple of months of reprieve from mortgage and car payments.
When, and if, Kelly-Yu gets called back to work, she said she wanted to make sure conditions protected her from the coronavirus. “Giving me my job back is one thing; making sure that I’m safe … that’s just as important as me getting my job back,” she said.
Kelly-Yu, a native of Pittsburgh, where her father was the head of an auto workers union, first became involved in politics during Bill Clinton’s run for the presidency in the early ’90s.
But it wasn’t until 2018 when Kelly-Yu became involved again in politics, canvassing for the Culinary Union.
She says she canvassed for her family, her son-in-law, who’s an immigrant from the Philippines, and because “we have to make a change, because what’s going on right now is not right.”
Her daughter, who graduated from nursing school in January, has pitched in to help Kelly-Yu and her husband, who takes care of her grandchildren, ages 4 to 11.
Her husband motivates her to be politically involved, cooking her breakfast before her 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. canvassing shifts. When she returns home, he has her dinner ready.
Last month, she estimated that she had knocked on thousands of doors, “talking to a lot of voters and walking many steps.”
“Every day my goal is to knock on one more door than I did the day before,” Kelly-Yu said.
