Beaten Down, Worked Up by Steven Greenhouse

Author:Steven Greenhouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Big Labor Gets Less Big in Politics

AFTER CELEBRATING INTO THE EARLY HOURS, the nation’s top labor leaders held a triumphant news conference on November 5, 2008, and they weren’t bashful about claiming much of the credit for Barack Obama’s historic victory the day before. Speaking at the AFL-CIO’s headquarters across Lafayette Square from the White House, John Sweeney, the labor federation’s president, did some serious boasting. He said that labor’s field operations had successfully reached out to 13 million union members in twenty-four states and that in just the past four days 250,000 union volunteers had made 5.5 million phone calls and visited 3.9 million union households. Sweeney also said 67 percent of union members had voted for Obama, while 30 percent backed his Republican opponent, John McCain, who often had sharp differences with unions on economic policy and other issues.

“In the defining industrial states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, union voters were the firewall that stopped John McCain,” Sweeney said. “In state after state, we defeated candidates with lousy voting records on worker issues and replaced them with candidates who will be champions for working families.”

With regard to one constituency that tilts heavily Republican, AFL-CIO officials noted that white men overall had voted for McCain 57 percent to 41 percent, while white men who were union members favored Obama 57 percent to 40 percent. Similarly, gun owners overall backed McCain 62 percent to 37 percent, but gun owners who were union members voted for Obama 56 percent to 44 percent.

Union leaders were jubilant that day, feeling they were in the catbird seat because they believed that organized labor did more than any other outside group to help Obama win. At that news conference, labor leaders didn’t hesitate to pronounce their goals—some would call them demands—for the new president and Congress. With the nation in a severe recession, union leaders called for a robust economic stimulus and job creation package. They also wanted Congress—both houses were controlled by Democrats—to enact an ambitious bill they said would enable unions to organize millions more workers and help reverse labor’s decline. The bill, the Employee Free Choice Act, would allow unions to insist on a card check procedure during unionization campaigns. Card check—some labor leaders prefer to call it majority sign-up—makes it easier to unionize workers by letting unions gain recognition from an employer as soon as a majority of a workplace’s employees sign pro-union cards. Under the proposed legislation, unions could choose card check instead of the traditional method in which workers vote in a secret-ballot election that takes place after the employer has typically mounted an intense antiunion pressure campaign. The bill also called for using binding arbitration to settle contract disputes whenever an employer and a newly certified union failed to agree on a contract within 120 days. One study found that 52 percent of newly unionized workplaces failed to reach a contract within one year and 37 percent didn’t have a contract within two years.

Randel Johnson, the U.

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