I CALL FOUL.
I am a lifelong Democrat, an injured worker, a pensioner, and a father in a mixed-status family. For more than ten years, I have asked people on my own political side to put enforceable federal workers’ compensation protections and broad immigration legalization on the table. I have used constituent emails, complaints, articles, music, and videos to ask for a serious answer.
On September 30, Christoph Mair, legislative assistant to Representative Liz Berry, responded to my appeal by writing that “emails sent to the entirety of the Legislature are often low priority.”
I read that sentence and asked: what is an injured worker supposed to do when the local route has already failed to produce a meaningful answer?
My federal human-rights demands do not become less important because I ask more people to hear them. To me, this response exposes a damaging problem in my own party: the gatekeeping between people living with harm and the officials who decide what receives attention.
My message described a civil-rights complaint, disability-access concerns, alleged failures in services, and requests for oversight. His response explained the office’s email volume and directed me to Representatives Mary Fosse and Julio Cortes and Senator June Robinson.
I have already approached those offices. Being sent around the same circle does not answer the questions inside my letter.
Every constituent email should be taken seriously. When a person reports injury, family harm, or failures of access, the office should ask what needs review and who is responsible for the next step. The number of recipients must not become a reason to disregard the substance. Sometimes people widen their appeal because the local route has not produced a meaningful answer.
A mass email can be evidence of someone trying hard to be heard.
Lawmakers and their assistants should help bring evidence into public decisions. Workers and families should be able to ask for review, explain what happened to them, and learn who will act on their concerns. No office should treat the persistence of a person seeking help as a reason to stop listening.
Assistants and elected officials, on the right or the left, owe representation to workers as well as business interests. A worker’s evidence deserves attention just as a business lobbyist’s proposal does. When the intake process becomes a barrier, the office needs to examine its practices, train its staff, and establish a clear route for substantive complaints and follow-up.
I spent approximately fifteen years working at the healthcare bedside. I treated people with respect and dignity. Their education, citizenship, income, or ability to express themselves perfectly did not determine whether they deserved care.
I also served in AmeriCorps in Washington in its early years. I studied political science and business law at Yakima Valley Community College, and I did well in those classes. That is part of my background. People deserve to be heard whether or not they have college coursework, a degree, or a public-service résumé.
I have represented myself in workers’ compensation and SSDI proceedings. I know the exhaustion of trying to learn the rules while living with the harm those proceedings are supposed to address.
My family’s history reaches further. My stepfather faced a long struggle for SSDI after an injury. I served as lay representative for my undocumented father-in-law after his workplace injury. He continued working, and I believe doing so contributed to his death. Those experiences are part of why I keep speaking.
My mental-health care has supported peaceful expression through music and videos. Those records speak to my experience and my efforts to cope. They do not, by themselves, prove every allegation I make. The correspondence and administrative records must be examined on their own merits. But disability must never become an excuse to dismiss the person bringing them.
I am a pensioner. I am a worker. I am a husband and father. I should not have to write like a professional lobbyist to receive a serious answer.
That is what I mean by intellectual snobbery: treating a person’s delivery as more important than the substance of what that person is trying to report. Polished language does not make a dismissive answer adequate.
This is not one isolated attempt to contact my local lawmakers. My Drive archive preserves an August 5 constituent confirmation addressed to Senator Robinson, with Representatives Cortes and Fosse copied. It asked them to forward specific federal workers’ compensation demands to Washington’s congressional delegation. An August 15 transmission record again identifies those local recipients, a response request, and demands covering worker protections, universal healthcare, and permanent legalization. Those confirmations establish what I submitted and to whom. They leave the questions of review, forwarding, and follow-up to be answered. [3]
I am naming the people and offices whose responses I want examined.
Mr. Mair and Representative Berry: explain what your office will do with the concerns in my correspondence beyond referring me elsewhere.
Charles Wichert and Representative Cortes: my recollection is that Mr. Wichert told me your office would not help me or my stepson. Review the exchange and answer it directly. If my recollection is incomplete, identify the actual response and the assistance offered.
Representative Fosse: you previously served as Representative Emily Wicks’s legislative assistant. You know the importance of the route between a constituent and an elected official. Please explain what happened to my appeals across your staff and elected roles, and what you will do now. [1]
Senator Robinson, Senator Bob Hasegawa, and the current and former aides who handled my appeals: identify what you received, what you forwarded, and what action followed. Staff turnover should not erase the record or end responsibility for a constituent’s unanswered concerns.
I ask the same of the federal offices I have approached, including those of Rick Larsen, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Pramila Jayapal, and Adam Smith. I also direct my policy challenge to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: put injured workers’ protections and broad legalization visibly alongside your other public priorities.
To Jason Call and Kshama Sawant: campaigns can use their platforms to address these demands before winning another election. I recall being told by Call that Whole Washington and Medicare for All were priorities. My question remains: where were injured workers’ enforceable federal protections and mixed-status families in that agenda?
Universal healthcare matters. So do income replacement after an injury, rehabilitation, benefit accountability, and family unity. My demand has always been for these needs to be addressed together.
This is not an invented policy concern. The 1972 National Commission on State Workmen’s Compensation Laws examined state systems and recommended federal minimum standards. In 2015, a congressional letter involving Murray, Sanders, and other lawmakers called for greater federal oversight. The Congressional Research Service documents both efforts. Those earlier actions deserve acknowledgment—and a public explanation of what should follow now. [2]
This is a national issue. State lawmakers may not be able to enact federal legislation, but they can publicly support it, convene affected people, and ask their congressional colleagues to act. A state single-payer campaign cannot serve as a complete answer to demands for national worker protections and broad legalization.
I am also asking why broad amnesty and family unity have not received the prominence I believe they deserve. Calls to defund or reform ICE must be accompanied by a clear account of the legal status and lasting protections our families need.
Representative Jayapal and the other progressive leaders I have appealed to: when you speak against immigration enforcement abuses, where is the sustained public campaign for broad legalization? When you speak for labor, where are enforceable federal protections after a worker is injured? Put those answers beside your healthcare agenda.
I fear the direction of immigration enforcement and the treatment of immigrant labor. My challenge to Democrats is to turn their stated support for workers and immigrant families into sustained action and concrete protections. Silence and procedural referrals have left me feeling that the people who labor are being pushed aside.
Republicans have not provided the answers I am asking for either. My criticism of Democrats comes from inside my own political tradition. I believe a decade of insufficient attention to these demands has harmed people nationally. My family’s experience is why I refuse to let that failure disappear behind another campaign slogan.
Criticizing ALEC and the political right cannot be the whole answer. My own side must also examine whether its gatekeeping leaves injured workers and immigrant families outside the rooms where priorities are set.
My criticism is of conduct and accountability, not someone’s age, degree, birthplace, or ethnicity. I want the same dignity I gave people at the bedside.
After years of appeals, I have often felt belittled and brushed aside. I believe that experience reflects a damaging failure of representation. I am asking for the record to be reviewed, rather than asking readers to assume every person acted with the same motive.
Here is the test: preserve the correspondence. Review the complaints and referrals. Meet with affected workers and families. Answer the policy proposals. Identify the official responsible and the date of the next step.
For concerns outside an office’s authority, explain the limits and make a useful referral with a named contact and follow-up. For allegations the office disputes, answer them with facts.
Stop treating the format of my appeal as the answer to its substance.
One email or many: our lives deserve serious consideration.
I have used civil avenues to tell my country what happened to me and my family, and why the same problems still demand attention. My anger belongs in the record alongside the substance of my requests.
I CALL FOUL on Washington Democrats’ gatekeeping. Preserve the record. Hear the worker. Answer the family. Put our voices and our federal rights on the table.
Darren Raye Fonzseau
Workers Won’t Be Silent
More of my reporting and testimony
- I Sent My Own Side the Records — The Silence Continued
- Workers Won’t Be Silent: The Public Documentary
- Who Got the Table—and Who Got Told No?
Source notes
- A January 2021 legislative roster in a Tacoma Housing Authority board packet lists Mary Fosse as Emily Wicks’s legislative assistant: https://www.tacomahousing.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/boc_packet_2021-01-27_electronic_0.pdf (PDF page 79).
- Congressional Research Service, Workers’ Compensation: Overview and Issues, sections on the National Commission and new calls for federal oversight: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R44580/R44580.9.pdf (PDF pages 22–26).
- Preserved Drive records: August 5 constituent confirmation; August 15 transmission record; Master Constituent Notice & Peaceful Advocacy Evidence Index. These are private source references; their access settings have not been changed.
The September 30 Mair quotation was checked against the original email. Statements about other personal encounters are the author’s account, not independently established findings of misconduct. The ten-year description refers to the author’s overall advocacy history, not a claim that every named person held the same role for that entire period.