Leaders

Seth grew up in the Brickyard section of Germantown, the son of a working class Black mother and a Jewish father who earned his living with his hands. He walked his first picket line at ten, in North Philadelphia, when his stepfather struck for better conditions at Giuffre Medical Center. As a teenager his family moved to Schenectady, New York, where General Electric cut its workforce from 50,000 to 2,000 and all but shuttered the town. Having grown up Black and poor, it was the first time he saw white poverty up close, and it taught him what he's organized on ever since: working people have far more in common than what's used to divide us.

He paid his way through Temple as a housepainter and a hotel line cook, and he's spent the decades since organizing alongside the people doing that work. Ethiopian and Eritrean parking attendants in DC who went to jail to win a union and a living wage. Philadelphia charter school teachers taking on the corporate privatizers running the School Reform Commission. Support staff at Chestnut Hill Hospital who overturned years of discriminatory pay and promotion practices. Nurses across Pennsylvania bargaining against chronic understaffing. After the murder of George Floyd, Seth helped found the Philadelphia Labor for Black Lives Coalition, now sixteen unions strong, which stood with the Black families facing eviction from the University City Townhomes.

In 2023, with developers and speculators pushing families out of Germantown and the Northwest, Seth ran for City Council in the 8th District against a three-term incumbent on housing as a human right, fully funded schools and libraries, and public safety built on reducing poverty and expanding mental health care rather than cages. He won 49.4 percent in a race that came down to provisional ballots. He and his wife Aisha, a veteran teacher, have been married 24 years and raised both their kids in Germantown.