Nothing divides the labor movement like a good cityelection. To watch the calculus of narrow self-interest play out in the scrambledunion endorsements of candidates in this month's New York mayoral primary is tobe grateful that all politics isn't literally local--that at least rudimentaryconcerns of ideology tend to loom larger in state and national contests.
In the several recent presidential elections, the national labormovement has gone to great lengths to unite behind a single Democratic candidateearly and to stay unified. Though some of these candidates were not everythinglabor might have wished, a look at the fragmentation in many local electionsgives one a new appreciation for the unity-above-all strategy.
To be sure, the four-way contest for the Democratic nomination, culminating inthe September 11 primary, hasn't exactly been a rousing battle of ideas--or one,for that matter, of contesting political forces or charismatic candidates. "Sofar, this is a race where nobody has much reason to do anything for any of thecandidates; they're all identical," says one of New York's leading longtimeprogressive activists. They're not identical, of course, but the more liberalcandidate (Mark Green) has thus far run somewhat to his right while the morecentrist candidates (the other three) have tacked left.
So it should come as no surprise that many of New York's unions have surveyedthe field with an eye toward their own parochial concerns; this, in fact, is thenormal course for local unions in big-city elections. But this year, it stands insharp contrast to the course charted by labor in Los Angeles's mayoral electionthis spring. Both cities' labor movements have faced essentially the same set ofcircumstances: their populations grown increasingly nonwhite and Democratic,their Republican mayor ousted by term limits, and an array of chiefly Democraticcandidates vying for top office. But the two cities' movements could not haveresponded more differently from each other.
Over the past several years, under the leadership of the County Federation ofLabor, L.A. unions have been remarkably successful in advancing a common, broadprogressive agenda; this year, much of that agenda set the terms of debate in LosAngeles's mayoral election. Most of those unions came together early to endorsethe candidacy of Antonio Villaraigosa, a former state-assembly speaker andonetime local-union organizer who'd come to personify the city's labor-Latinoalliance every bit as much as Al Smith once personified Tammany Hall. By so doing,the Los Angeles labor movement risked more than its New York counterpart did inthis election cycle and may well have lost more, too, when Villaraigosa went downto defeat.
In the long run, however, it also achieved more. "The exceptional thing aboutthe Villaraigosa campaign," says David Koff, a Hotel Employees and RestaurantEmployees union staffer who is a key figure within L.A. labor's brain trust, "isthat you had a charismatic leader with a charismatic following--a movementintensely supportive of a leader they learned from but whom they also instructed,as they did the city." That's an assessment no one is likely to make of any ofNew York's candidates or unions at the conclusion of this fall's mayoral contestthere.
At first glance, the most logical recipient of union support inNew York's mayoral race would seem to be Mark Green, long a standout among thenation's most progressive and intelligent leaders-in-waiting. Green has been amajor figure in New York politics for at least 20 years; over the past eight, inthe city's elected position of public advocate, he has emerged as Mayor RudyGiuliani's most trenchant critic--forcefully condemning Giuliani's pro-developerand anti-minority biases and his generally sadistic intemperence, whilechampioning the economic interests of working-class New York.
In return for all this, Green has won the institutional backing ofmuch of New York's working class--but not as extensively as he might haveanticipated. Unions representing a total of 330,000 members--roughly one-third ofthe city's unionized workers--have endorsed him, but they are preponderantlyprivate-sector locals and they include none of the city's big-threepublic-employee unions: the United Federation of Teachers (UFT); ServiceEmployees International Union (SEIU) Local 1199, the city's hospital and healthcare workers; and District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, Countyand Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a local that represents the lion's share ofNew York's other municipal employees. Green has long championedteacher-evaluation standards to the point that he was never going to be the UFT'sfirst choice. Not surprisingly, the UFT endorsed Alan Hevesi, a highly articulateand intelligent pol who was a leading liberal in the state legislature but who,during the past eight years as city controller, was more reluctant to criticizeGiuliani than were many of his fellow Democrats. (It is a mark of New York'spolitical underdevelopment that Giuliani still dominates the city'sdiscourse--both as commentator and as topic.)
More surprising was District Council 37's endorsement of Peter Vallone, a67-year-old clubhouse Democrat who has outlived the clubhouses and has served ascity-council speaker since 1986. By most measures, Vallone is not the most obvious recipient of support from this heavily African-American union: He's themost conservative Democratic candidate, and his political base is outer-boroughwhite Catholics. His endorsement by the city's police and fire unions made perfectsense, as his career has been marked by a consistent silence regarding thedepartments' racist practices and an equally consistent support for theircontract demands. But then, Vallone had also delivered for DC 37, repeatedly,on matters contractual--as had the two city-council members whom DC 37 supportedfor controller and public advocate, the other citywide positions on the ballot.If anything, these endorsements seem intended to impress the many incomingmembers of the council, which is undergoing wholesale recomposition as a resultof term limits: Deliver for us, and we'll deliver for you.
More significant is the late shift of Dennis Rivera, head of 1199, fromneutral to pro-Fernando Ferrer. Under Rivera, 1199 has become the city's leadingunion in articulating a broad progressive agenda--and its most effectivedeliverer of votes on election day. "If you polled our members," says oneactivist in this heavily Latino megalocal, "they'd vote for Ferrer." But Riverahas had close ties to Hevesi and had reason to be suspicious of Ferrer's recentconversion to champion of the poor and nonwhite--"the other New York," as Ferrerputs it. After a career as a moderate Democrat and following an abortive 1997mayoral run in which he supported the death penalty and the fingerprinting ofwelfare recipients, Ferrer has morphed this year into a scathing critic of theracism and brutality of New York's finest, of the city's stunning economicinequality, of virtually every aspect of Giuliani's mayoralty. Until the finalweek, Rivera had evidently concluded that Ferrer couldn't win. For apublic-employee union, few acts are more reckless than backing a loser. ButFerrer's late surge in the polls was enough to bring Rivera on board.
This utter absence of solidarity among New York's unions, alas,is precisely what makes this a normal big-city election. Public-sector unionsare everywhere "enmeshed in the culture of incumbency," in the phrase of onelongtime New York union politico; their endorsement is characteristically anattempt to get more leverage, consolidate what leverage they have, or simplyavoid retribution from the candidates who will soon be or already are theiremployers. In 1981, when many New York unions backed the insurgent mayoralcandidacy of Brooklyn assemblyman and stellar labor champion Frank Barbaroagainst incumbent Ed Koch, who was then in his most demagogic, union-bashing,right-wing mode, DC 37 felt compelled to stick with Koch, since he was obviouslygoing to win big.
In 1999, Los Angeles's main city-employee union, SEIU Local 347, hadcarefully monitored the rewriting of the city charter and made sure that itpreserved all worker rights and benefits. But when members of the city council,including the chair of the budget committee, came out against the documentbecause it weakened the council's power, the local abruptly abandoned its veryconsidered support and opposed the new charter when it was placed on the ballot,rather than displease its members' employers. Given unions' obligations to cutthe best deals for their workers, such endorsements are always defensible--whichdoesn't mean that some of them aren't more than a little absurd.
At the federal level, the two largest public-sector unions, AFSCMEand SEIU, can and do adhere to more broad-based endorsement criteria, sincevirtually none of their members is a federal employee. At the state and locallevels, however, incumbent endorsements--even Republican ones--are more the rulethan the exception. Within SEIU, which is half private-sector, halfpublic-sector, this creates some rifts. In New York, SEIU's building-serviceand janitorial local, under new progressive leadership, has backed Green, even as1199 has sat it out. In Los Angeles, the janitors' local was perhaps the mostfervent and effective supporter of Villaraigosa, while the city workers' Local347 was the most vehement backer of City Attorney James Hahn, whose modestvirtues included having been an exemplary employer of the unionized lawyers andclericals in his office.
More important, unfortunately, is an incipient racial fault line. LosAngeles's city-employee union is preponderantly African-American; and as LosAngeles's private-sector working class and its unions have become overwhelminglyLatino, a gulf has opened between them and the disproportionately blackpublic-sector workers. With Latino immigrants playing an ever larger role in theunions representing blue-collar and low-end service-sector workers all across thecountry, while public-sector city workforces remain heavily black, the occasionsfor public-sector unions charting their own course in local elections are onlylikely to grow--most especially, as was the case in Los Angeles and will probablybe the case in New York, if the black community is unwilling to vote for aLatino, even a principled anti-nationalist like Villaraigosa.
The divide between public- and private-sector unions isn't theonly source of labor disharmony in city elections, of course. Manybuilding-trades locals invariably prefer the developers' choice for mayor,provided that he or she wants union construction workers on the job. For most ofthe past half-century, Chicago's trades-dominated labor council has been the"handmaiden of the Daley/development machine," as one dissident union leaderterms it. In Los Angeles, some building-trades locals joined the city workers toplump for Hahn, partly out of nostalgic affection for his late father, CountySupervisor Kenny Hahn, the greatest pothole-filler Los Angeles has ever known.
Despite these defections and Villaraigosa's defeat, the L.A. labormovement nonetheless both set and legitimated a broad agenda (expanding theliving-wage ordinance and funding more affordable housing) during the mayor'srace that even Villaraigosa's rivals, including the newly elected Mayor Hahn,were compelled to embrace. Indeed, L.A. labor has accrued more power preciselybecause of the scope of its social unionism--because it has proven effective inchampioning the interests of all immigrant workers, members or not. In an utterlyanomalous strategy for a big-city central labor body, County Federation of Laborelection campaigns are waged, with great success, not just among union membersbut in immigrant communities generally. Armed with this added moral and political clout, the L.A. labor movement, even in defeat, remains a pre-eminent and creative force in city politics. Would that the same could be said of its larger but less focused counterpart in New York.
