Guest Editorial: State Rep. Kaela Berg - It’s About Time We Send Working People to Congress.
Working people built this country. Now it’s time for us to lead in Congress.
BNB Note:
While politics is often analyzed from the outside, BNB’s Guest Editorial Series aims to flip that perspective by highlighting the firsthand experiences of those working inside the political and policy arena. This includes lawmakers crafting and ushering legislation, candidates navigating the campaign trail, career civil servants implementing public programs, and political operatives shaping strategy behind the scenes.
The goal is not to litigate every claim or endorse every position, but to provide readers with direct insight into how decisions are made, how institutions function, and how power operates in practice.
Below, is a guest editorial from Minnesota State Representative Kaela Berg (DFL-55B). Berg is running in the DFL primary to represent Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District.
Washington has left working people behind. Not just in policy, but in language, in candidates, in basic respect for the reality of working-class life. In 2024, we paid the price. Party leaders told voters the economy was fine — when we knew it wasn’t. They treated workers like we were too unsophisticated to understand our own circumstances.
The wealth gap between the top 1% and everyone else has widened for years. The ultra-wealthy keep getting richer while the rest of us grind through rising gas prices, medical bills, and grocery costs. Working people know things are bad. We’ve been sounding the alarm.
But change won’t happen if the politicians who are supposed to fight for us don’t know how bad it is themselves. Just 3% of Congress comes from the working class. Just 3% knows how to stretch a paycheck to the last dollar, cut a pill in half to make a prescription last, or do the math in your head at the grocery store because you can’t afford to be wrong.
How can we expect Congress to fix this economy if the people writing the laws have never lived it?
That’s why I’m running. I’ve been a union flight attendant for over twenty years. I’m a labor leader and a Minnesota state representative. And even as a legislator, I still live paycheck to paycheck.
That is one of my greatest strengths. When someone in my community tells me they’re struggling, I don’t have to imagine it. I live it too.
And I’ve delivered results. I authored and passed the ban on captive audience meetings, shutting down one of the oldest union-busting tactics on the books. My gun violence prevention law was the last one we passed in Minnesota — banning binary triggers and making straw purchases a felony. And after fighting for my own son in a broken education system, I put a mental health professional in every public school in the state.
That’s what happens when you send a working-class person, and a labor leader, into government. We don’t just talk about the issues our communities are begging us to fix — we deliver, because we’re building a future for our communities, our kids, and our families.
And there’s no better place to find working-class candidates than the labor movement. We are the backbone of some of the most organized, most politically active movements in this country. We’ve stood on picket lines. We’ve shut down airports and hospitals to demand what we’re owed. When an aircraft crashed and flipped upside down in Toronto in 2025, it was highly trained flight attendants who evacuated 80 people and got every single one of them out alive. We know how to move fast in a crisis — because our jobs require it every day.
There’s real precedent for candidates like me. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a bartender and waitress before she ran for Congress on a shoestring budget and beat a ten-term incumbent. She redrew the boundaries of what the Democratic Party was willing to fight for. Her pro-worker, anti-billionaire message filled arenas on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour with Bernie Sanders, reaching working people across ideological lines who are hungry for someone willing to tell the truth about power.
Mary Peltola won Alaska by speaking directly to working people who depend on the land and sea to survive. Now she’s running for Senate to keep fighting for her community, for the fisheries, and for the workers who keep them running.
AOC and Peltola prove that working-class candidates don’t just belong in these seats — we win in them, and we change what’s possible once we’re there. Not because we studied the working class from a distance, but because we live it — on the picket line, behind the beverage cart, on the fishing boat, and at the kitchen table doing the math on a bill that’s due before the paycheck comes in.
Minnesota’s Second District deserves a member of Congress who has had to fight for their livelihood, and who will bring that same fight to Washington. I’m someone who’s lived it, who’s organized alongside it, and who knows exactly what’s at stake if we get this wrong again.
Working people built this country. Now it’s time for us to lead in Congress.