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 attended Wister Elementary and Greene Street Friends School and played baseball, basketball and soccer at the Germantown Boy’s Club and Police Athletic League. 

Throughout his life, wherever he found himself, Seth has organized with folks to fight for their rights. He joined his first picket line in North Philadelphia at the age of ten when his step-father, a union maintenance worker at Giuffre Medical Center went on strike to improve conditions in the hospital. He fondly recalls the chanting and singing on the picket line and credits that early experience with planting the seed for his lifelong love for labor and anti-racist, working class organization. 

As a teenager in the mid-1980’s, Seth moved with his family to Schenectady, NY a small industrial town upstate where he attended public high school. In Schenectady, Seth saw the impact of capitalist globalization hit his friends and their families hard. During the decade, the town’s once massive employer, General Electric, downsized from 50,000 workers to only 2000. Schenectady was all but shuttered. Having grown up Black and poor, it was the first time he saw real white poverty. This experience helped teach him that working people have a lot more in common than separates us. 

When he returned to Philadelphia after high school, Seth enrolled at Temple University and moved into his Grandparents’ house on Conlyn Street behind Pennell School. At Temple, Seth helped forge a broad multi-racial coalition that won leadership of Temple Student Government and brought the student body into the fight alongside their North Philly neighbors to halt Temple's gentrification efforts in the surrounding community. When he was elected Vice President, Seth noticed that graduation rates for Black students, especially young Black men were far below their white peers and pushed the University to create a Recruitment and Retention Center for Black Students. When Temple graduate students organized their union (TUGSA), Seth helped rally undergraduate students to their cause and when Temple replaced union security guards with non-union guards at half the pay, Seth helped organized students to stand with the workers. 

While at Temple, Seth worked as a housepainter to pay tuition, rent and bills - a job he maintained for a decade. Along with his time as a line cook in hotel restaurants, these experiences taught him the long hours and grueling conditions Philadelphians face on the job. At the Four Seasons Hotel, a swinging door separated two worlds: the glitz of fancy living, and the world of overworked kitchen staff making poverty wages with no healthcare. 

These experiences inspired Seth to apply for work as a labor organizer, first with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union. His first assignment was working with Ethiopian and Eritrean parking garage attendants in Washington, DC, who were fighting for a union and a living wage. Through mass action and sometimes facing arrest, these workers fought to improve their conditions and when they were arrested and went to jail, Seth went to jail with them. Eventually they won their union and a living wage - and their courage inspired Seth to make organizing his life’s work. 

In 2005, Seth moved back to Philly with his wife Aisha and their two year old daughter Nadja. Aisha taught African-American history at Bartram High School in Southwest. Seth worked as a cook until landing a job with the American Federation of Teachers helping Philadelphia charter school teachers win a voice at work - against high teacher turnover and to improve the quality of education in their schools. The fight for the rights of teachers in charter schools was part of the broader fight of students, parents, teachers and communities against the installed School Reform Commission, an alliance of corporate privatizers and the Republican majority in Harrisburg (and a few Philly Democrats!). 

In 2011, Seth accepted a promotion to become the Political Director for the American Federation Teachers New Jersey based in Perth Amboy. For seven years, Seth commuted daily between Philadelphia and North Jersey where he helped organize members to fight then-Governor Chris Christie's education cuts and attacks on the public pension system. Seth also led AFTNJ’s efforts to elect poet and activist Ras Baraka the Mayor of Newark - on a program to stop foreclosures, return Newark's schools to local control and reverse the widespread charterization of the school district. In 2015, NJ Citizen Action, a broad coalition of citizen groups, made Seth a recipient of their Annual Citizen’s Award for his leadership in efforts to pass the $15 statewide minimum wage. 

During this time, Seth also directed Labor’s election efforts in multiple counties over numerous election cycles for the NJ AFL-CIO - leading to a decisive win for Phil Murphy in 2017. Since Philadelphia’s municipal elections occur off year, AFTNJ lent Seth to the Philadelphia Labor Council, AFL-CIO to help run their election year efforts. Staging out of the Working America office in Germantown, Seth pushed the Labor Council to expand its efforts into the NW and recruited unions to help mobilize voters in Nicetown, Germantown and Mt. Airy during the 2015 and 2016 cycles. On election day in 2016, more than 200 union members showed up to phonebank, knock doors and get out the vote all over the NW. 

Since 2018, Seth has organized with our state’s largest healthcare union, SEIU Healthcare PA. He organized healthcare workers in both the public and private sectors to stand together to improve patient care and strengthen working conditions. Shortly after joining SEIU, Seth led support staff at Chestnut Hill Hospital to a hard fought contract victory that included reversing years of discriminatory pay and promotion practices. In 2019, Seth helped nurses from all across the Commonwealth bargain an historic contract with the state - aiming to overcome chronic staffing shortages at the State's public health facilities. 

In the midst of the nationwide uprising following the murder of George Floyd, Seth helped found the Philadelphia Labor for Black Lives Coalition to bring Labor, especially Black Labor, more prominently into the fight against structural racism. The coalition now includes sixteen unions and continues to fight broadly for the needs of Black workers and our communities, including for an end to police violence against Black people. Recently, the coalition has also helped to support the Black families facing eviction at the University City Townhomes, a subsidized affordable housing community slated for sale to developers. 

In 2023, amidst expanding gentrification and growing displacement in Germantown and throughout the Northwest, Seth ran for City Council to represent the 8th District. He challenged three term incumbent Cindy Bass and built a strong multi-racial, working class led coalition of voters and activists committed to defending the integrity of their communities against unaccountable development and vulture capitalists. The campaign prioritized housing as a human right, full funding for public schools, investment in our libraries, parks and recreation centers - and community based, non-carceral solutions to violence that center poverty reduction and expand access to mental health services. Seth won 49.4% of the vote in a race that came down to provisional ballots. 

Seth has been married to Aisha Anderson-Oberman for 24 years. Aisha’s a veteran teacher who has worked for 25 years in public and independent schools. She’s currently the Director of Real World Learning at Big Picture Philadelphia. They have two amazing children, Nadja, 20; and Gyasi,16 both passionate about the creative arts, both raised proudly in Germantown. 

When he's not working or parenting, Seth loves to cook and laugh with friends; study our radical Black history and US Labor history for lessons we can apply today; bop to his granddad’s old jazz records and (loudly) cheer on Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey and his beloved Sixers. 

When we FIGHT, we win! When we ORGANIZE, we win! When we VOTE, WE WIN!