Uncivil Unions

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c151fe52-e206-47b5-a0b5-ae34cd88b4e3

by Alyssa Rosenberg
Big Labor, sick of empty campaign promises, tries a new strategy this election.
Post Date Monday, January 14, 2008

When Barack Obama collected the endorsement on Wednesday of Nevada's largest union, Culinary Workers Union Local 226, many observers proclaimed that he may have picked up the key to victory in the state's date January 19 caucuses. But whether or not their backing helps Obama win the presidency, the Culinary Workers will already have secured something better than mere campaign promises: In order to win their endorsement, the leading presidential candidates had to join the union's fight in their contentious battle with the MGM Grand and other Las Vegas casinos over health care benefits and job security guarantees. Obama pledged to "have his sun tan lotion and hat ready" to walk a picket line if the workers struck, met with the union's negotiating team, and celebrated with them in October when they signed contracts with six casinos. In addition, the Culinary Workers were able to secure pledges from Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards to spend time on the picket line if the union went on strike in Nevada.

Nevada's Culinary Workers aren't alone among unions in wanting more from campaign season than empty promises. The precipitous decline of union membership in the United States--from almost 12 million unionized private-sector workers in the 80s to less than 8 million in 2006--means that the labor movement can no longer afford to plunge endless resources into political campaigns without some guaranteed return. In a dramatic shift from its traditional practices, Big Labor has a new strategy this campaign season that focuses less on propelling their favorite candidates to victory and more on using election-time voter mobilization to build membership and draw attention to unions' own key contract fights. This year will be a critical test of whether those new strategies can help win elections and provide a much-needed blood transfusion to America's unions.


Labor endorsements have long been prized by politicians because union members frequently vote as a bloc--three-quarters of the approximately 12 million union voters who turned out in the 2006 Congressional elections pulled the lever for Democrats--and their members often have prior political experience, making them excellent volunteers. Unions also have significant amounts of money to give to candidates and to spend on independent efforts to sway voters. The AFL-CIO, America's largest union federation representing 10 million workers, spent $40 million on the 2006 elections and has pledged that it and its 55 member unions will spend $200 million on the 2008 cycle, more than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton combined raised through the third quarter of last year.

That support comes with a price: Once in office, union-backed candidates are expected to pursue a broad economic agenda that includes increasing the minimum wage, making it easier to form unions, inserting labor protections in trade deals, and reforming working conditions.

But recent experience has made unions wary of staking their political credibility on endorsements. In 2004, despite blowing away the rest of the Democratic field with his number of union endorsements, then-Representative Dick Gephardt sputtered to a fourth-place finish in Iowa, and then dropped out. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) backed Vermont governor Howard Dean in November 2003, thinking it had found a match for its focus on aggressive organizing and growth--until Dean's candidacy was undone in the blink of a news cycle.

Even when union-backed candidates make it into office, there's no guarantee that they will deliver for the unions who supported them. Take Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who won resoundingly in 2006 thanks in part to hundreds of thousands of dollars from union PACs and a stamp of approval from the AFL-CIO, which gave him a 97 percent positive vote rating. He even wears a lapel pin of a miner's canary, representing the dangers of the workplace before the advent of labor laws and union advocacy. But all his passion couldn't change the Republican decision last summer to block the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier for workers to form unions and that was a key labor movement priority.

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