LABOR'S RISKY PLUNGE INTO POLITICS
Meyerson, Harold
In July 1983 Marty Manley, one of a number of able young staffers laid off by the decimated International Association of Machinists, traveled to Washington to meet with Paul Jensen, labor...
...There is no question that an organized white-collar/professional stratum is more inclined to a workingclass orientation than an unorganized whitecollar/ professional stratum: everywhere, Mondale has done markedly better with whitecollar union households than with nonunion households...
...To that end, Manatt offered labor unprecedented representation on the National Committee (35 members of AFL–CIO unions, 9 of the National Education Association) and its Commission on Rules...
...On Super Tuesday election night, Massachusetts AFL–CIO President Arthur Osborne discovered the limits of a solidarity campaign in the 288 Massachusetts of 1984...
...To be sure, new-class/ old-class tensions have suffused Democratic party politics for nearly two decades...
...A fundamental disparity underlay labor's involvement in the 1984 campaign...
...Suddenly, all the problems labor had entered the presidential contest to alleviate—its growing ideological and cultural marginality—were factors imperiling the outcome of that contest...
...the high was $41,000...
...Instead, Pierce was able only to set in motion a pilot program at a Nashua Western Electric plant, where Mondale fought Hart to a draw...
...The clash of cultures is rooted in conflicts of class...
...However, Mondale, Hart, and Jackson split the white-collar union households of Illinois evenly, each pulling 32 percent of that vote...
...Exit polls showed a more favorable disposition toward unions among Mondale's Ohio voters than among his Pennsylvania voters, but a decidedly less favorable disposition among all others...
...They had an extraordinary concentration on delegates early in the game," says the usually politic Paul Jensen, to whom Mondale had entrusted the task of brokering labor's delegates...
...By the late 1970s it had become clear that labor and its agenda were in danger of becoming marginalized even within its own political party...
...Once the debacle of New Hampshire and its aftermath proved them right, they were able to roll up the vote for Walter Mondale when he needed it most...
...There are few more deeply held beliefs in New England today than that women deserve equal pay for equal work," says Wilhelm...
...the problems are found among the clerks, who have an "alarmingly low" rate of voter registration and minimal responsiveness to the union's political programs...
...The shop stewards were the missing piece...
...Extrapolating per capita income as if everyone for purposes of comparison were in a family of four, he discovered that 55 percent of Americans, in 1978, had incomes that placed them between the high and low budget lines...
...Without such a movement, Walter Mondale can do little more than advance protectionist policies...
...In American politics, these figures signify the grave weakening of the very center of the Democratic party, the polarization of its constituents into two increasingly conscious wings: blue-collar and service-sector workers and the poor in need of an interventionist state, and members of the professional and managerial strata who are opposed to greater state intervention on behalf of deindustrialization's casualties...
...The kind of support we need for collective bargaining and our ongoing operations, we can get...
...In New York, Mondale's white-collar unionist vote matched his blue-collar unionist vote: both came in at 44 percent...
...The divisions between the Mondale and 290 Hart constituencies have been widely noted, but these discussions have been limited by the impoverished vocabulary of mainstream American political discourse: "class," as a word and a concept, does not seem to exist...
...A more decisive test came in the northernmost corner of the state in the paper-mill town of Berlin...
...Without a credible movement for guaranteed full employment, auto and steel workers will perforce oppose the conversion to a high-tech economy...
...The number of voters focusing on labor as an institution declined...
...The UAW also had a long286 standing concern over the lack of accountability of the Democratic Congressional Delegation to the party platform...
...In sum, the strength and legitimacy of unions remain crucial factors in this year's voting...
...no one argues that it did not help where it was used...
...Among the older industrial unions, only the Auto Workers promoted Mondale so fervently...
...My president will talk to Lane," was how one vice-president of a maritime international described his union's procedure to me...
...For labor, the DNC was to be the Archimedean point from which it would begin once more to move the world its way...
...They have had a tough time of it: Phelps Dodge has kept the mines running with strikebreakers...
...In recent years virtually every weapon in labor's arsenal has been effectively neutralized: strikes are broken, collective bargaining becomes corporate blackmail, courts empower companies to break contracts as they see fit...
...within it AFSCME, the Communications Workers, and the United Food and Commercial Workers...
...The two wings of the party are likely to grow more distinct, coming perhaps to resemble the British Labour party and the British Liberal party yoked together by a nonparliamentary system and a reactionary opposition party neither could join...
...A number of internationals whose members held liberal positions on a range of social issues— the Service Employees, for instance—contrasted Mondale's support for the freeze with Hart's inclination toward the build-down...
...This went over with the leadership, but it doesn't work with the rank and file...
...I n fact, deindustrialization and Reaganomics are splitting the Democrats apart on economics as surely as Vietnam did on foreign policy...
...De facto prevailed: of the first 35 states to vote this year, fully 25 voted in caucuses...
...Indeed, if the clash were simply cultural, as William Schneider recently wrote in the New Republic, "the end of the Vietnam War should have allowed these two factions to become reconciled...
...We didn't have anything to say to the members that worked," says Nancy Shier, "until we started campaigning against Hart...
...As they saw it, the increasing prominence of media-manipulated primaries in the nomination process had given the party one politically marginal nominee (McGovern) and another politically unreliable one (Carter...
...Voting along income lines declined in these states, but voting along union/nonunion lines declined only slightly...
...in 1980, 9 percent...
...Even the Swedish TCO, into which almost all of Sweden's white293 collar workers are organized, gives 60 percent of its votes to bourgeois parties...
...Their goal was to restrict the prenomination franchise to party members, a transformation that could be accomplished de jure by having 30 state legislatures rewrite the laws or de facto by switching from primaries to caucuses...
...Still, whatever qualms some of the more liberal union leaders may have had about the process or even about its ultimate beneficiary were more than offset by the virtually universal belief in the need for an early, unified labor endorsement...
...285 Fortunately for Mondale, there were some in labor who, even while acquiescing in the need for a top-down endorsement the first time around, never entertained that campaign's prevailing illusion that such endorsements would deliver the membership...
...And some of the most successful union organizing drives of recent years have mobilized community support by virtue of the unions' championing a range of social causes and constituencies...
...and Rhode Island, which Mondale wrote off in the frantic weeks between New Hampshire and Super Tuesday before even starting a campaign there and where labor, though not small, is weak and atrophied...
...But politics is tougher...
...Pierce had planned to implement this program in New Hampshire, but it fell victim there to logistics and overconfidence...
...He pulled down 1,293 votes in Berlin, and Hart 821...
...Our nation was founded on the concept that United We Stand, Divided We Fall...
...For the past year, Local 285 of the Service Employees' International Union (SEIU), a Bostonbased statewide local of nurses, technicians, and clerical workers, has been led by Nancy Mills, an articulate 33-year-old "movement" veteran heading an all-woman slate of local officers who ran on a platform of feminism and democracy...
...the steward received a card on each, noted that person's preference, tried to persuade the undecided, and did a get-out-the-vote campaign with the Mondale supporters...
...Perhaps the clearest expression of the gap that had opened between the leadership and the rank and file was that nowhere in Massachusetts were there any unpaid labor volunteers for Mondale...
...When Kennedy dropped out," one president of a major international recalls, "everyone said, `It's Mondale,' without bothering to discover the attitudes of the members...
...Suppose, though, a local's leadership is seen as the antithesis of everything the national AFL–CIO connotes (often unjustly: in fairness, Kirkland has helped move the AFL–CIO much closer to the newer social movements than Meany would ever have considered...
...The AFL–CIO is seen as Lane Kirkland—as big, selfish, and, by some, as reactionary on foreign policy...
...For only a strong labor movement can create a political movement for full employment, and its absence further polarizes current political discourse...
...This was a lesson learned belatedly by the Massachusetts AFL–CIO...
...AFSCME political operative Ed Draves had been briefed on the program, then missed the meeting in Manchester—across the White Mountains, three-and-a half hours' drive in 289 mid-winter—at which the program was canceled...
...Thus auto and steel unions stressed Hart's opposition to "domestic content" legislation and extensions of tradeadjustment assistance...
...We'd done phone banks and mailings and something was still missing," says AFSCME Pennsylvania operative Rick Bloomingdale...
...We should have brought it up from the rank and file to the unions...
...Moreover, the divisions that then existed between the two camps were not fundamentally economic...
...in 1964 it was 12 percent higher...
...Wilson and Draves presented the program at the state AFL–CIO convention, and a number of internationals, crucially AFSCME and the Steelworkers, used it extensively...
...But Greenlee County is the kind of terrain where there are no neutrals...
...To be sure, many of the major internationals consulted their leadership down to the local-president level...
...Walter Mondale has emerged preeminently as the candidate of the Rust Bowl...
...Stephen J. Rose has recently updated to 1983 his 1978 chart depicting social stratification in the United States...
...For when it comes to public acceptance of unions, Ohio and Indiana are not Pennsylvania or New York...
...nonunionhousehold voters went 46 percent for Hart, 30 percent for Mondale...
...But the limits of white-collar solidarity are pronounced...
...They're not institutionally oriented the same way...
...The morning after New Hampshire, Jerry Clark, AFSCME's national political director, called COPE's Dick Wilson to apprise him of the single piece of good news to come out of that state...
...There has been a steady erosion of the differential between the union vote for the Democratic presidential nominee and the total vote...
...Unfortunately, labor's weaknesses ensure that this debate will be waged in a highly unsatisfactory manner...
...It consists of politicians who have endorsed Mondale and all they can deliver, which in this largely postpatronage age is little indeed...
...We try to connect our members to the labor movement...
...Indeed, the political impossibility of discussing a "safe" transition to a high-tech economy accounts for the peculiar centrality of the Chrysler bail-out in the imagery of the Mondale campaign...
...In direct contrast to its other leaps into presidential politics, most notably the 1944 efforts of the CIO PAC, labor in the Kirkland era felt compelled to assert its strength in the presidential arena at a time when its strength was eroding everywhere else—because its strength was eroding everywhere else...
...Ohio, after all, gave us not only the sit-in but also Robert Taft...
...q 294...
...none of the presidential campaigns had any activity or material there, and the miners' unions—in this case, chiefly the Steelworkers and the Machinists—had too many other problems to organize turnouts for the caucuses...
...By the conclusion of the Carter presidency, that feeling had spread to the more progressive internationals as well, even though they had allied themselves with the New Politics liberals against the Meany wing of labor in the '68, '72, and '76 campaigns...
...Half of them couldn't tell you which union they belong to," says AFSCME's Jerry Clark...
...The full impact of the Young Shop Stewards— henceforth Yussies, to conform to this year's parlance—was not felt for a while...
...As the campaign progressed, to a degree unprecedented in a Democratic presidential contest, people were voting their class...
...According to ABC, Ohio union-household voters went 47 percent for Mondale, 32 percent for Hart...
...The task was to change the rules so as to enable the regulars to do just that...
...The national AFL–CIO's computer broke out shopbyshop a list of the Democrats...
...Unions can still mount campaigns in a number of ways in which they might emerge as champions of a public far broader than their own membership...
...Labor was the Mondale field campaign: whatever phoning, leafletting and getting out the vote went on for the campaign was done by labor...
...some polled the rank and file, though in the spring and summer of 1983 this amounted to little more than testing name recognition...
...Blue-collar workers are more union conscious and more politically active than white-collar workers within AFSCME...
...For despite their professions of egalitarianism in administering cutbacks, the fiscal and industrial policies of such new class champions as Gary Hart and Jerry Brown fall most onerously on the working class...
...The NBC Berlin Election Day Exit Poll showed Mondale and Hart running even until 3:30 PM, when the mills let out...
...For instance: • Of the 10 states to have held primaries in February, March, or April, 6 have work forces with a higher percentage of blue-collar workers than the national average...
...The garment unions publicized Hart's support for the subminimum wage...
...In this instance, it was an approach that the leadership of labor had adopted as well...
...Labor provided unprecedented financial support for the committee (about $2.5 million in 1983, one-third of the DNC budget...
...The bargaining position of the remaining industrial workers has been undermined accordingly...
...As far back as January 1983," that president of a major international asserts, "Lane came to the presidents of those unions that had historically been the most active politically and asked us to hold our ducks in a row...
...Manley had come to propose that the campaign adopt a variant of the IAM's On-the-Job Canvass, a program in which Machinist shop stewards polled their members in the workplaces and used their responses to develop a range of programs in the shops...
...But the most distinctive thing one could say about Mondale was that he had the AFL–CIO endorsement...
...On caucus day, Greenlee County gave Mondale 84 percent of its vote...
...The way I used to sell it," says AFSCME's Nancy Shier, "was: 'Labor is on the line...
...he asked...
...You can win if you involve the workers all the way along and bring in the community," Wilhelm concludes...
...On the eve of the primary, the labor operatives decided to do a Get Out The Vote drive among these 13,000 unionists...
...Labor also had something to say...
...The wages of unionized workers, concentrated in these declining industries, rose a mere 2.6 percent in 1982, compared to an average rise of 5.8 percent for nonunion workers...
...The cultural hostility has abated somewhat in recent years, particularly as unions have become more heavily female and minority in composition...
...but it also reflects the extremely strong support for Mondale among AFT members, whom cutbacks have reduced almost entirely to union veterans ("I don't think we have anyone with less than 14 years seniority," says the AFT's Rachelle Horowitz), and who are deeply embedded in the organized contentiousness of New York civic culture...
...in Massachusetts, he carried only the old textile-mill towns of New Bedford and Fall River...
...q PS— May 14 • Since this article was completed, Mondale has lost Indiana and Ohio by a narrow margin, heavily unionized, smokestack states that he might have been expected to win...
...During the first year of the Reagan presidency, a Democratic Congress acquiesced in a substantial dismantling of the welfare state...
...Greenlee County is geographically isolated and sparsely populated...
...Within the incremental frame of reference that prevails in daytoday politics, those tasks are being taken more seriously...
...In 1982 unions won only 43 percent of representation elections, the lowest figure since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, and the percentage of unionized workers stood at its lowest level since the rise of the CIO...
...This was no time to be mobilizing shop stewards...
...Labor cannot prevail bureaucratically, through changes in the rules...
...Mondale polled 44 percent of the white-collar union-household vote to 35 percent for Hart...
...By the fall of 1983, the combination of the rules changes, the withdrawal of Ted Kennedy, the AFL–CIO endorsement, and the ascendancy of Mondale presented labor with the prospect not of marginalization but domination of the presidential nominating convention...
...They're working their way through college, or whatever...
...So one voted for Mondale to demonstrate solidarity with labor...
...The limits of white-collar politicization are amply evident in the NEA's campaign for Mondale this year...
...in 1982, that figure had risen to 45 percent more...
...The UFCW reflects the merger of three unions—the Packinghouse Workers, the Meatcutters, and the Retail Clerks...
...Of these, Mondale carried 4—Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Pennsylvania— and lost 2—New Hampshire, which has the lowest level of unionization of any state outside the Sunbelt or the Farmbelt...
...The several hundred phone bankers around the state received hourly minimumwage checks from the AFL–CIO...
...Hell," commented NEA political staffer Skip Roberts at this juncture, "we can't even win a referendum on ourselves with our own members...
...Labor is seen as the AFL–CIO," says one Massachusetts union leader...
...those whose incomes fell beneath the low budget line rose from 30 percent to 40 percent (and among them, those in poverty rose from 11.5 percent to 15 percent...
...Labor and Mondale were lulled by Mondale's lead into waging casual campaigns, failing to stress economic issues even as Hart hammered away at Mondale's acceptance of union funds...
...Fully 500 of the local's 2,600 members served with specific assignments on the organizing committee...
...These are third- and fourth-generation miners, largely Latino, who know, as the IAM's Tony Medina puts it, that they "owe everything to the union...
...They have larger rural and conservative populations, and they permit crossover voting...
...The consultants' task, presumably, was to plead for votes by appealing to members' sense of solidarity with a movement so in touch with its members that it could not induce any of them to phone on its behalf...
...Alone among the major internationals, the NEA has refrained from contrasting the candidates' positions on broad economic issues...
...Of the 119 Mondale Congressional District delegates in Pennsylvania, 68 came from unions...
...The following day, by a margin of roughly 7:6, New Hampshire labor voted for Hart...
...An NBC phone poll of unionists in Iowa showed 65 percent for Mondale and 9 percent for Hart, compared to 46 percent support for Mondale and 15 percent support for Hart in the overall caucuses...
...in 1968, 13 percent...
...they have tried to evict the strikers from their homes and run them out of town...
...If you want unions to be politically effective, then all who agree with its aims should be able to join, making voluntary contributions...
...To both Kirkland and Charles Manatt, the incoming Democratic Committee chairman, the rehabilitation of the institutional party was central to the Democratic comeback...
...In New Hampshire, for instance, over 20,000 AFL–CIO members were called--over half the state's membership...
...The achievement of both Mondale and labor between New Hampshire and Pennsylvania was to have redefined the terms of the election...
...Only in making common cause with the community to save a Sickle Cell Anemia program has the membership sanctioned broader activism but, as Mills points out, "that appealed to their sense of professionalism, too...
...The Democratic party that was once the party of workers on the assembly line," Gary Hart said in early February, "is in danger of becoming the party of organized labor leaders in Washington...
...But the culture of the blue-collar unionist is not in the ascendancy anywhere in the United 292 States...
...Many of our clerks see their jobs as temporary," says 01, well...
...What better way to promote their accountability than make them automatic convention delegates...
...and nearly every union mentioned his support for the deregulation of natural gas and the $10 per barrel tax on imported oil, his opposition to the Chrysler bail-out and to extending the jurisdiction of OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Act...
...Ironically, it was preponderantly the white- and pink-collar unions that were Mondale's biggest champions in the endorsement process: outside the AFL–CIO it was the NEA...
...In every one of those 10 states, Mondale has done better among voters from union households than among voters from nonunion households...
...It was awfully labor-intensive," says organizer John Wilhelm, "but it made it impossible for the university to paint the union as an outside agent...
...By no means did labor confine itself to the delegate hunt, even during the New Hampshire period...
...And the question before labor, if it is to prevail in that struggle, is how it can build even a faint approximation of the spirit of Greenlee County among a membership that is by no means so isolated, that is decreasingly blue-collar, and increasingly indifferent to the ideology and traditions of unionism...
...In 1978, people in professional and managerial positions earned 37 percent more than blue-collar workers...
...Of these, Hart carried 4—Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, New Hampshire— losing to Mondale only in New York, which has much the highest rate of white-collar unionization in the country...
...I n the four weeks between Super Tuesday and the Pennsylvania primary, labor earned the right to every delegate slot it has negotiated from the Mondale campaign, and then some...
...These states, then, are polarized along union/nonunion lines...
...But no one will support you just because you're a union...
...In Massachusetts, where other active Mondale forces included NOW and the nuclear freeze, unions turned out enough people at the caucuses to secure an average of 4 seats in most of the 6 delegate districts...
...True and perceptive as far as it goes, which is not far enough...
...Labor can run an effective campaign on specific economic issues (and it shortly was to do it), but in the absence of issues, the focus of attention was riveted entirely on its role in Mondale's rise—and hence, on its institutional character, on the image of its leadership...
...remember that Henry Jackson lost Pennsylvania to Jimmy Carter...
...In sum, for the first time in the campaign, labor was able to focus on the conditions and concerns of its members rather than the state of their unions...
...It would, in short, have marked a new stage in "American exceptionalism": the unconscious labor party—a formulation so contradictory that it never came to pass...
...Their fear was that the gap between leadership and rank and file could not be closed by conventional political union programs...
...In a program devised by Jan Pierce, political director of the Communications Workers of America in the northeast, shop stewards were briefed on the positions of the candidates and encouraged in the week before the vote to talk one-on-one with each of the registered Democrats they represented in their worksite...
...Its fullest test did not come until the following week in Pennsylvania...
...For Bill Olwell, political director of the United Food and Commercial Workers, the problem is integrating the membership not into the union but into the civic culture...
...The volunteers who staff the offices for a normal campaign simply don't show up at a Mondale headquarters: this is a campaign, for instance, without a single student coordinator anywhere in the nation...
...Does that improve the image of labor, at least with the rank and file of 285...
...His strength in Western Pennsylvania was awesome...
...When our rank and file think of 'labor leadership,' " says Mills, "they think of Kirkland and Meany, not of us...
...The labor movement is under attack and has decided to fight back on the political front.' And I hardly talked at all about Mondale...
...Among those 10 states, 5 have work forces with a higher percentage of workers in professional or managerial positions than the national average...
...conversely, in every one of those states, Hart has done better with voters from nonunion households than with those from union households...
...Consolidated phone banks were established, so that for the first time not just the members of the more active internationals but all AFL–CIO members were called...
...Neither would have been nominated had party regulars played a greater role in the process...
...Not only was Gary Hart antipathetic to labor leadership, but there was a unifying thread that ran through a wide range of his votes: that workers had to bear the burden of an economy in transition and disarray...
...Under assignment from the national AFL–CIO, operatives of three dozen internationals traveled to Iowa, New Hampshire, and other early key states such as Illinois...
...Even in a consciously progressive white-collar local like SEIU 285, Nancy Mills and the rest of the leadership are repeatedly adjured by the membership not to involve the union in issues of housing, reproductive rights, or general welfare...
...For good as well as bad reasons, popular control over the nomination process began to wane...
...Labor has endorsed the freeze, marched alongside NOW for ERA ratification, even supported gay rights (although the rapprochement is basically one-sided: few Yuppies marched with PATCO or boycotted Continental Airlines...
...This would have been a labor party without ideology, without a distinct labor program, and, if the campaign labor was running for Mondale before the Gary Hart challenge is any indication, without an activated rank and file...
...I know we can count on you to see that Massachusetts Labor once again shows its solidarity with a vote for Mondale...
...It is a cultural clash that is going on in the Democratic Party," Elizabeth Drew has written in the New Yorker, "and the chasm, once opened, may be hard to bridge...
...Unbeknown to the campaign—indeed, unbeknown to Manley—a number of progressive political directors, most notably Jan Pierce of the Communications Workers, had refused to let the shop steward program die...
...At one caucus in Oklahoma, there were 200 plumbers...
...Where the slates were brokered at the top, Mondale's managers managed to hold labor's percentage down-69 of the 209 Mondale delegates from Congressional Districts in California are from unions—but in states where the delegates were chosen in caucus, the figures soared...
...Both professional and service workers remain largely estranged from the culture and politics of unionism...
...The decision was characteristic of the Mondale campaign...
...The more conservative internationals had complained since the McGovern campaign of the declining role of party regulars in the presidential selection process...
...In 1983, that figure had dwindled to 42 percent...
...Besides, July was one of Jensen's busiest months: his primary assignment was to pick up the AFL–CIO endorsement, and the campaign had just decided to advance the date of that endorsement from December to October— a move that had to be voted on at the Research for this article was made possible by a grant from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, for which the editors express their thanks...
...From 1976 through 1983, the three great industrial unions—Auto Workers, Steelworkers, Machinists— lost a total of 1.3 million members...
...Accordingly, Mondale's greatest areas of strength are the blue-collar worlds of industrial America...
...In neither wing of the growth sectors of the economy, then, and in neither wing of the growth sectors of American unions (the UFCW grew by 63,000 members last year), have political union programs made a deep impact...
...As labor historian J. David Greenstone has noted, "the McGovern nomination was the intraparty triumph of a culturally (though not economically) hostile group of middle-class ideological liberals . . . , ancient intraparty enemies of Meany and his allies...
...The basic challenges that unions confront— to increase and mobilize their members, to restore ideological legitimacy both with the members and the general public—necessitate a greater openness to both members and the public...
...Mondale has carried all of the states among those with higher than average unemployment...
...It must be understood that with the single and decisive exception of labor, the much vaunted Mondale organization is a myth...
...Now they were also able to move the campaign one step away from the bureaucracy...
...In the job market, these figures reflect the disappearance of decent-paying unionized jobs in manufacturing and construction in the wake of deindustrialization and recession...
...In July 1983 Marty Manley, one of a number of able young staffers laid off by the decimated International Association of Machinists, traveled to Washington to meet with Paul Jensen, labor liaison of the Mondale campaign...
...The leaflet produced a few days before Super Tuesday by the leadership of the State Federation ("an old-line Irish leadership that hasn't gone out of the office in the last 20 years," in the words of one international staffer who had worked with them on an earlier campaign) can serve as a textbook on how not to reach the rank and file: Each of us in the Labor Movement must make it known that we in Massachusetts speak with one united voice [the leaflet began...
...In a large state, however, it is a program that takes several weeks to set up...
...291 The days in which the Democratic party could harmoniously reconcile its class differences are gone, then, but neither is the party about to split apart...
...Labor and working-class voters were all over the map in 1976...
...He does much better among blue-collar unionists than among white- and pink-collar unionists...
...It is never a bad time to mobilize shop stewards...
...But the economy intervened...
...teachers and the building trades stressed his support for requiring the unemployed to take the first available minimumwage job or lose their unemployment insurance...
...287 "Which candidate is closest to big labor...
...There are exceptions to this, of course, but they may do little more than confirm the rule...
...Why do we never hear about small labor...
...This reflects the nearly total unionization of public employees in that state...
...Moreover, the union went to both the New Haven and Yale communities, demonstrating statistically that the wages of women and minority workers were kept arbitrarily low...
...Of the avenues open to labor, only politics remained—and there too the difficulties mounted...
...Let us pause for a moment to consider what might have been...
...Indeed, until the national AFL–CIO overruled it and sent Marjorie Phyfe into Massachusetts with three weeks left before the primary, the State Federation had intended simply to contract out the labor phone bank to a private consulting firm, at a cost of $71,000...
...In the week between Iowa and New Hampshire, while Hart was gaining at Mondale's expense throughout the state, Berlin's shop stewards went through the mills talking with the workers...
...Labor and other special interests all occupy the same political niche to facilitate candidate proximity...
...The young shop stewards are the best face labor can have with our members...
...After New Hampshire, it subsided...
...In Illinois, for instance, NBC exit polls showed 46 percent of the blue-collar unionhousehold voters for Mondale, compared to 26 percent for Hart and 22 percent for Jackson...
...Devoid of a theme until Gary Hart gave him one, Mondale's chief message was his own anointment...
...in New Hampshire it was 11 out of 12...
...Mondale then started drawing two votes to every one for Hart...
...The recently successful unionization of Yale's clerical workers, for instance, was a model both of union building in a nonfactory setting and of unionsolidarity building in the broader community...
...The trades really ran with that one," says Dick Wilson of the national AFL–CIO COPE (Committee on Political Education...
...It is a question to which there are no easy answers...
...The dividing lines between Mondale Democrats and Hart Democrats are lines of class, and where those divisions break down, where there are cross-overs, it is at least in part a function of the level of class organization, that is, the strength or weakness of unions in a given state...
...its assumption has been that you nail down the endorsement and then the issues and members will fall into place...
...In the San Jose local in which the IAM's associate political director, Marjorie Phyfe, had put such a program in place, and where Manley had then carried it through, the voluntary political contributions from the 2,200 members had risen in a year's time from $600 to $28,000...
...Many of the more progressive unions, particularly the UAW, whose president, then Douglas Fraser, co-chaired the Hunt Commission on rules, entertained a more Europeanized model of party structure...
...But what is "labor" to the rank and file, what is its institutional face...
...Why does the union limit itself to people covered by our contracts...
...We must let the leaders of our government know that the Labor Movement in Massachusetts is alive and well and dedicated to preserving hard-won gains inherited from those who have gone before us...
...In early winter '84, labor began to swamp the Mondale delegate-selection caucuses...
...And yet, it could hardly have sounded like a European convention...
...Labor, however, was split in those battles, with some unions and unionists backing Kennedy against Humphrey, others bolting to support McGovern four years later...
...Those with incomes above the high budget line rose from 15 to 18 percent of the population...
...New class flirtations with John Anderson-style third parties will doubtless continue, but the permanent threat of Reaganaut rule is likely to prove, as it has this year, a powerful incentive for the Yuppies to stay within the Democratic party and contest over it with labor...
...In 1956 and 1960 the union vote was 15 percent higher than the overall vote...
...For a family of four, in 1983, the low budget line was $17,000...
...By then the AFL–CIO was pushing it heavily...
...so did the phone bankers in Alabama and several other early states...
...The county to have given him his highest percentage so far is Greenlee County, Arizona, whose only inhabitants are the miners and their families living in the company towns of Phelps Dodge, against which they have been striking for over a year...
...During the Carter presidency, unions saw their full-employment bill gutted, laborlaw reform defeated, and a recession deliberately put in place by a Democratic administration...
...There's been a lot of talk about special interests, big labor, a top-down endorsement," says Draves...
...Given the centrality of labor to the Mondale campaign, Manley argued, this was a program with all kinds of potential for building grass-roots support exactly where Mondale needed it...
...It was a question of how much the campaign wanted an issue-oriented labor movement," says Manley, who today runs the AFL–CIO political program in San Jose and the Silicon Valley...
...Our members think we've become a special interest...
...The remarkable presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson notwithstanding, the story of the 1984 Democratic presidential contest is the unprecedented polarization of such a contest along the lines of class...
...In Pennsylvania, Mondale took 58 percent of the blue-collar union-household vote to 33 percent for Hart...
...Indeed, the shift in union membership is away from blue-collar work: 48.8 percent of all unionists were enrolled in manufacturingsector unions in 1956, while 37.3 percent of unionists belonged to such unions in 1978, and the figure is doubtless lower today...
...With Hart's v' to rolling in (he carried Massachusetts labor by a margin of 4:3 over Mondale), Osborne did a post mortem on the campaign: "We tried to bring the campaign from the leadership to the rank and file," he said...
...Mrhat died on primary night in New Hampshire was the top-down laborization of the Democratic party...
...There was finally something else to say to members besides variations on the solidarity theme...
...Over the next three weeks, labor was to turn the campaign around precisely by deinstitutionalizing it...
...the Boston Globe pollsters wanted to know shortly before Super Tuesday...
...When NBC broke down their phone poll union-by-union, however, they found UAW support for Mondale at 74 percent and for Hart at 3 percent, where NEA support for Mondale stood at 49 percent and for Hart at 15 percent...
...It is the unions, after all, that are advancing the cause of comparable worth through the courts, a campaign that stands to benefit nonunionized women workers as well as those who are unionized...
...As I write, the shop-steward program is put in place for Ohio and Maryland primaries, and the AFL–CIO plans to use it extensively this summer to register voters...
...Some "Marxist" apologists for George Meany used to contend that the dividing lines between the antiwar forces and the party regulars were those of class...
...the tasks remain membership mobilization and politicization, and the forging of stronger bonds with the broader society...
...The program did not receive its next test until New York, where Pierce and Draves, both New Yorkers, were able to promote it in a number of internationals...
...In short, the Democratic party seems in for a prolonged siege of intraparty class war, and the debate that will take place at this summer's convention over "domestic content" legislation will be but the first in a series of contests over the specific tilt of state intervention...
...Of these, 4,000 identified themselves as Mondale supporters, 9,000 as undecided...
...Thinking it was still on, he trained the shop stewards from the Paper Workers, a conservative international whose leadership had inclined toward John Glenn...
...Instead of the member getting a letter from Lane Kirkland or the state AFL–CIO, he's being contacted by the guy who represents the union on the lowest level—usually a young guy...
...Which one, a network asked, was "closest to labor and other special interests...
...Despite the officialdom's and the staffs desire to do more, they are still constrained by their membership to discussions of Mondale's positions on education: anything else, they believe, would alienate their members...
...Union political directors are virtually unanimous as to the difficulties of reaching white-collar unionists politically...
...Confirmation of the wisdom of this approach came when two-thirds of the student body at Yale Law School signed a petition announcing their refusal to cross a picket line if the workers struck...
...in 1976, 12 percent...
...Where issues were stressed, they were frequently those of interest only to members as unionists—Mondale on education in AFT and NEA publications...
...No one argues that Mondale would not have carried New York or Pennsylvania had the program not run...
...The service sector has its difficulties, too...
...By any quantitative measure it was a triumph, "a hundred times what we've had before," in the assessment of Nancy Shier, AFSCME's Illinois political director...
...Contemplating the marginalization of unions in New England, on the eve of Super Tuesday, Peter diCicco, vice-president of the International Union of Electrical Workers, entertained the notion of open membership...
...they say, 'Oh, we're part of those guys with the big cigars?' And the political program that our members think the endorsement is based on is narrow labor issues—situs picketing, labor-law reform...
...AFL–CIO Executive Council meeting on August 9. Jensen—and Mondale—had only a few weeks left to concentrate on the presidents, vice-presidents, and political directors of 33 international unions...
...We were interested," Paul Jensen recollects, "but we just weren't able to pick it up...
...Labor would have been the likely subject of attack in any event, but Mondale's campaign cast labor in the worst light imaginable...
...Distinct working-class voting is waning, too...
...Had Mondale won New Hampshire and swept Super Tuesday, this summer's Democratic Convention in San Francisco would have resembled in institutional composition a convention of a European Social Democratic or Labor party...
...letters went out from internationals and locals, and from the local, state, and national federations...
...If it has accomplished nothing else, this year's Democratic presidential race has driven that lesson home to at least some of the leadership of labor...
...Hart took all those with unemployment figures lower than the average (except Georgia, where Mondale was aided by the Carter connection...
...What happened in New Hampshire, and in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, was that the election had become the one kind of contest labor was least equipped to win: a referendum on itself...
...The one arena in which labor's influence continued to grow during this period was the institutional Democratic party, in part because the party was decaying at an even faster rate than labor...
...In some of these matters, Walter Mondale had only recently himself arrived on the side of good— natural gas deregulation, after all, was a legacy of the Carter administration—and with his conversion proclaimed on several million pieces of literature, the unions were able to anchor him more firmly in their camp...
...Yet it is the blue-collar workers who are voting most heavily in the Mondale column...
...The one-on-one program is the reverse...
...Some of the smaller internationals—and a few of the larger—had no discernible endorsement process at all...
...And we did...
...Inadvertently, most of the literature labor produced in the period before New Hampshire had the effect of deemphasizing the issues and spotlighting the institution...
...So the class war, though labor entered the presidential arena to alleviate its ravages, promises to be an enduring feature of the struggle in that arena...
Vol. 31 • July 1984 • No. 3
