Employee rights
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has some tough words for former political rival and current Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in the Hulu documentary series “Hillary,” which is set to be released on Friday.
In particular, Clinton says Sanders didn’t start working until he was in his 40s.
“[Sanders] was a career politician. He didn’t work until he was 41 and then he got elected to something. It was all just baloney, and I feel bad that people got sucked into it,” Clinton says in the four-part Hulu docuseries about the 2016 presidential race.
Sanders, who has been serving as a Vermont senator since 2007, is running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination with a pitch that he is relatable to average working Americans, promising things like Medicare for All and the cancellation of student debt.
While a spokesperson for Sanders’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding his work history, CNBC Make It obtained a copy of Sanders’ resume from the 1980s from the The Jack and Shirley Silver Special Collections Library located at the University of Vermont. (The library’s research collection includes the papers of a number of Burlington, Vermont, mayors and state politicians, a spokesperson tells Make It.)
Take a look.
The three-page resume is on City of Burlington letterhead, where Sanders served as mayor from 1981 to 1989.
It starts with a personal section that lists Sanders’ date of birth, marital status (“Divorced, [with] one son”) and his health status (which he describes as “excellent”).
Under education, Sanders lists a BA in political science from the University of Chicago.
As for his employment history, Sanders says he spent his first 12 years of employment after graduation, from 1964 to 1976, as a freelance writer, carpenter, youth counselor and state employee.
According to Politico, after Sanders graduated from the University in Chicago in 1964, he bounced from job to job. Early gigs included working as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start (a program to help children in low-income families succeed in school) in New York City, Politico reported.
Then Sanders moved to Vermont in 1968 when he was 27, where he worked for the Vermont Department of Taxes as a researcher. He later moved to a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force, where he helped register people for food stamps, according to Politico.
From 1976 to 1981, Sanders wrote that he worked as a director at American People’s Historical Society in Vermont, writing and producing educational films. (According to Politico, Sanders made a 30-minute documentary on socialist Eugene Deb, a prominent labor organizer in the early 1900s, who Sanders cited as his hero.)
In 1981, Sanders, then 39, ran for mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and won by 10 votes. His new job came with a yearly salary of $33,824, which is equivalent to more than $100,000 in today’s dollars, Politico reported last May. After he was elected, Sanders told an Associated Press reporter that, “it’s so strange, just having money.”
Under the “activities” section of Sanders’ resume, he lists himself as chairperson of the Vermont Liberty Union Party from 1971 to 1976, where he says he opposed local telephone rate increases and fought to make public access television open to local filmmakers.
Sanders also lists his accomplishments as the mayor of Burlington during his six years in office: “Sanders has led the fight for fair taxation in Vermont and for major changes in health care and utilities. The Sanders Administration in Burlington has developed new programs in the area of arts, youth, women’s rights and environmental protections,” he wrote.
What’s more, Sanders says on the resume that he was the first “socialist” to receive 15% of the vote in the Vermont gubernatorial race.
On the last page of his resume, Sanders summarizes his accomplishments in bullet points, from being the “only socialist mayor” in the United States to being the only mayor “supported by third-party progressive movement against Democratic and Republican opposition.”