At first glance, the labor movement gathered at the Democratic National Convention couldn't have looked more united. On Sunday, labor delegates from every wing of the movement – the unions in the AFL-CIO, those in the breakaway federation Change To Win, and those in the unaffiliated National Education Association – gathered together in the Denver Convention Center in an unprecedented display of political unity. Rival federation chiefs John Sweeney (the AFL-CIO) and Anna Burger (Change To Win) shared the podium. AFSCME President Jerry McEntee introduced (perfunctorily, to be sure) SEIU President Andy Stern. All pledged to do everything they could, and work together in most cases, to ensure Barack Obama's election. A crowd of roughly 2,000 union members, including close to 1,000 labor delegates to the convention, cheered lustily.
And when the rally ended and the cheering stopped, delegates from four AFL-CIO unions – the Steelworkers, the Communications Workers (CWA), the Auto Workers (UAW) and the far smaller International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees (the IFPTE, which represents, among others, aeronautical engineers at aerospace companies) – gathered for their own reception in a nearby hotel. Over the past few months, the four unions have quietly formed a political-action sub-group, which they call the Alliance, to wage their own political campaign this fall, which they are funding by withholding their payments into the AFL-CIO's political program. This week in Denver, they have been caucusing daily.
Operationally, the Alliance unions will be working within the broader AFL-CIO program in the battleground states. But on their own, they will be running a joint worksite-based campaign in seven states, including the key swing states of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. They will also have a presence in three states that John McCain should win handily, but where there are key Senate contests on the ballot: Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In addition to the AFL-CIO's message, they will be delivering their own, which heavily stresses their opposition to corporate-led free trade.
The practical effect of the Alliance's semi-defection is too early to gauge. Overall, labor's program for the fall is massive and strategically very smart: Micro-targeting three million labor households in battleground states with a combined worksite, door-to-door, phone, mail, and e-mail campaign on which unions, in and out of the AFL-CIO, will spend a total of between $300 million and $400 million. That figures includes the outlays on the AFL-CIO's Working America program, which enrolls voters in largely white, working-class communities – many of them former auto workers and steel workers – into a hybrid union of their own, which doesn't represent them at their worksite but which does mail them election-related materials, talk to them on the phone, and send canvassers to their doorstep.
The four Alliance unions will be sending their volunteers into the AFL-CIO's precinct walks and sending their members at least some AFL-CIO mailings, in addition to putting out a message of their own. In that sense, says UAW President Ron Gettlefinger, their program is "AFL-CIO-plus. We follow the AFL-CIO plan where it makes sense."
The part of the AFL-CIO plan that the Alliance doesn't think makes sense is, as they see it, the Federation's deficient emphasis on laying the groundwork for enacting the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) next year. For labor, getting Congress to pass EFCA, which would enable unions to organize workers by proscribing management from threatening those workers if they vote union, is a matter of life or death. If Democrats can't elect Obama and push their numbers in the Senate close to a filibuster-proof 60, EFCA doesn't stand a chance. The unionization rate in the private sector stands at 7 percent, and without EFCA, labor may be looking not at renewed growth but at a private-sector unionization rate of 5 percent or less four years from now.
Which explains why the Alliance unions are playing in Mississippi and Kentucky, where Republicans could possibly lose Senate seats, and in Louisiana, where Sen. Mary Landrieu is the only Democratic incumbent on this year's ballot who faces a real electoral challenge. The Communications Workers and the Steelworkers (whose ranks also include paper workers and shipyard workers), in particular, have tens of thousands of members in these states – a figure not comparable to union numbers in places like Michigan, but enough, they hope, to impact close elections. "We can be part of the push to get enough votes for cloture when EFCA comes up next," CWA President Larry Cohen told the Alliance delegates at their Tuesday Denver caucus. Cohen stressed that in directing their shop stewards to talk to their members in these states, "We're not competing with anyone else; we're just trying to go deeper."
And yet, the Alliance only came into being because its union leaders were angered and frustrated by what they see as the public-sector union domination of the AFL-CIO's political program. Theirs is a many-layered resentment. Public sector unions usually don't face the kind of savage management opposition to unionization that members of the Alliance and other private-sector unions routinely encounter (which is why the public-sector unionization rate is close to 30 percent). Two public-sector unions, AFSCME and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) are the AFL-CIO's largest, and AFSCME President Jerry McEntee has long been the head of the AFL-CIO's political action committee. Not coincidentally, AFSCME and the AFT were Hillary Clinton's most significant labor supporters in this year's Democratic primaries. McEntee in particular was an ardent Clinton backer, directing his union to attack Obama directly and trying to push through an AFL-CIO endorsement for Clinton at the federation's executive council meeting in early March.
Though McEntee failed to obtain that endorsement, his maneuvering clearly angered other union presidents, among them Alliance leaders who were already dissatisfied by what they saw as the AFL-CIO's failure to give enough emphasis to southern states that Obama could not win but where the Senate races could impact the vote on EFCA. Their dissatisfaction only grew greater when, over the past few weeks, a group backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce began a massive ad campaign in some swing senate states that attacked Democrats for supporting EFCA, and the AFL-CIO was slow to respond. (The federation has now assigned some of its best staffers to mount a counter-campaign, but no one in labor disputes that business arrived at this battlefield first.)
But how good are the Alliance unions' political programs? By common consent, the Steelworkers' is first-rate – among the best of any union's in America. The CWA doesn't have the Steelworkers' stellar track record, however, and the UAW political program, like most UAW programs, is in steep decline from its glory days in the '40s, '50s and '60s. Converting their white members into Obama supporters will be no easy task. In a survey he took this July, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg found that in Macomb County, which abuts Detroit, only 47 percent of white union members backed Obama, with 34 percent of them supporting John McCain. The challenge for the UAW couldn't be steeper, and it comes at a time when the UAW is in many ways a shell of the great union it once was.
At the Alliance reception on Sunday evening, Steelworker President Leo Gerard told me there have been no discussions among Alliance leaders about keeping their group going after November's elections. This week in Denver, despite caucusing separately, Alliance delegates aren't drawing any other lines between themselves and the AFL-CIO. Indeed, their Tuesday caucus was attended by five AFL-CIO state presidents, and when some scheduled speakers failed to appear, some AFL-CIO staffers made impromptu presentations.
But the very fact that these unions have gone their own way on pre-election organizing reflects a further splintering of a movement whose watchword, supposedly, is solidarity. At age 72, AFL-CIO President Sweeney is widely believed to be serving his last term, but while some Change To Win unions might be willing to return to a somewhat revamped AFL-CIO, there is no consensus choice on Sweeney's successor, and the authority once exercised by the AFL-CIO continues to wane. "There's no center of gravity any more in the labor movement," one union leader told me. Instead, "there's a lot of jostling, a lot of egos, more mistrust, more maneuvering required to get things done." Or, as another labor leader told me, "We have one fractured, dysfunctional movement."
Not that labor's campaign for Obama and the Democrats won't be effective – the only question is whether it will be effective enough. "Fractured" and "dysfunctional" is not exactly what Obama, or American workers, need.
