Longtime union officials and staffers were exuding an almost gleeful incredulity this weekend on the eve of the convention. Not about the November election itself; on the question of the ultimate outcome, experienced political hands remain cautious. United Auto Workers Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Bunn fretted that “Michigan is closer than it should be” due to the social conservatism that prevails throughout much of the state. One union official worried that the largest numbers of dedicated activists tended to reside in such decidedly non-battleground states as California and New York, and couldn't easily be deployed to swing states. (The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, however, is doing just that, paying for 2,000 of its activists to go on leave in September and October and move, if need be, to swing states to staff the voter-mobilization programs of America Coming Together and other “527s.” This subsidized mass migration will cost the SEIU roughly $30 million -- which is only half the total expense that the union plans to incur in its efforts to elect John Kerry.)
But whatever the laborites' sentiments about November, they are stunned and pleased to find that the Kerry campaign is actually encouraging their input and involvement in the convention and the campaign. “I've been working with the Democratic Party for 30 years,” says one of labor's most senior operatives, “and for the first time in my memory, we're being treated like partners.”
For decades, despite the ostensibly pro-labor tilt of the Democratic Party, unions have had to fight just to get pro-worker language onto the platform on such crucial issues as trade. Not this year. Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO's chief policy and politics staffer on all things trade related, noted that Kerry's platform watchdogs were happy to see that the platform includes the need for establishing workers' rights and labor and environmental standards in trade accords. Kerry himself, a longtime free-trade supporter, began to alter his position during the battle over extending the president's fast-track authority in 2002, authoring an amendment to the bill that said no trade agreement could supersede labor and environmental laws enacted by the states. His amendment failed, but the idea pops up again on this year's platform.
Labor has also received enthusiastic backing on the platform and from the Kerry-Edwards ticket for its foremost institutional imperative, the Employee Free Choice Act. (The House bill, authored by veteran California liberal George Miller, has 204 co-sponsors -- that is, virtually every Democrat in the House plus seven Republicans -- not that the DeLayniks have any intention of bringing it to the floor for a vote.)
In a sense, the near-consensual acceptance within the Democratic Party of the imperative of changing labor law should not have been any great achievement. From any number of perspectives -- ensuring workers their fundamental rights, creating a force to boost wage income (our current raiseless recovery is in good part a consequence of our union-free private sector), boosting Democrats' electoral prospects (union members invariably vote about 10 percent more Democratic than the population as a whole) -- persuading the Democrats to support labor-law reform should have been a no-brainer. But it was never a priority of the Clinton administration, and it required a sustained program of elected-official consciousness-raising -- bringing workers illegally fired while on organizing drives, for instance, to the congressional Democrats' retreats -- on the part of John Sweeney's AFL-CIO to make this a key issue for the party, Kerry, and John Edwards.
The result? Edwards appeared at Sunday's caucus via teleconference, telling attendees, “We need a president who believes in the right to organize.”
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
