On Becoming a Movement

...But the experience of labor's candidates tells us something else, too...

...On paper the labor movement seems ideally suited to lead a populist insurgency in the Democratic party, but the reality is far less encouraging...

...At a time when many local Democratic party "organizations" are barely able to mobilize a roomful of volunteers to mail out a list of endorsed candidates, the threat of withholding access to labor campaign dollars, unionoperated phone banks, and other campaign services is hardly without its implications...

...Backed with the resources of the UMWA, Stump's campaign produced sophisticated television and radio spots hitting hard on the "populist" themes of protecting workers rights and family health care...

...We could literally bankrupt the entire labor movement and still be unable to match the dollars available to corporate America...

...Raising the political price for our support might be enough to corral wayward Democrats under a system where campaign expenditures were sharply limited, but not when corporate interests stand ready to replace the dollars we withhold...

...But it's not just the UMWA that has established such programs...

...Just as surely as the Great Society died somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam, the possibility for igniting trade union passions among America's young was lost as images of prowar hardhats charging antiwar marchers filled television screens...

...Advocates for this approach make a compelling case, but there's another strategy that incorporates much of the vision of labor-party supporters...

...Walter Reuther was prophetic when, in 1967, he observed that "a new concept of unionization" needed to take shape in the wake of the farm worker organizing campaigns in California...

...Senate...

...In New York, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union established a community center in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn where area residents, often Latino immigrants, can take classes in English as a second language or receive assistance on social service problems...

...Last year alone labor's PAC contributions to U.S...

...But now the question it was facing wasn't whether the union had the resources to get its members on delegate slates...

...While touched by the struggle for civil rights, they were more deeply moved by the threat of the draft and a faraway war...

...In the UMWA, it's meant helping to establish Miners For Democracy (MFD) as part of the union's Powder River Basin organizing drive in Wyoming...

...It was a lesson reinforced last year by the election of UMWA members to state legislatures in Alabama, West Virginia, and Illinois, and by the remarkable gubernatorial campaign of Paul Hubbert, a leader of Alabama's largest teacher's union, who came within a hairbreadth of unseating Republican incumbent Guy Hunt...

...And for good reason...

...Though it obviously contradicts some of the AFLCIObashing in vogue among organized labor's well-intentioned critics, the confusion that sometimes characterizes our political strategy isn't due to the AFL-CIO exercising too much authority as much as it is the result of the fact that, as a federation, it has too little...

...For unions representing manufacturing workers, 1991 may be remembered as the year when many of labor's "best friends" in Congress abandoned the cause of protecting American jobs to put negotiation of a U.S.Mexico Free Trade Agreement on a fast track...

...Faced with the seemingly hopeless task of reviving the Democratic party's commitment to 58 • DISSENT Reddrddag Labor's Strategy working people, a growing though still small number of union activists are calling for the creation of a labor party...

...Instead, the question was whether it was even worth the time and expense...

...However, the best example of the power of economic populism—and organized labor's role in advancing it—may be in the election of Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania to the U.S...

...By a 56 percent to 28 percent margin, pollsters found Duke supporters who are open to voting Democratic blame the wealthy and big business over minorities and welfare recipients for the squeeze on middleclass families...

...As a matter of sheer political arithmetic," the pollsters conclude, "these results suggest there is substantially more advantage for Democrats in championing the middle-class interests than in seeking to capture the anti-welfare, anti-minority message from David Duke...

...With its insistence that labor be more than loyal foot soldiers for party officials, the Wofford campaign stands as a rarity: an effort that successfully spoke to the problems affecting workers and accepted leadership from workers' unions...

...It's that our message — a hard-edged economic populism considered "too strong" by most social liberals—can succeed among low- and middle-income white voters...

...Though Stump's write-in campaign, begun a bare three weeks before the election, could have been one more doomed protest candidacy, it became something very different...

...Polling conducted by Garin-Hart Strategic Research in the wake of David Duke's chillingly strong 1990 Louisiana U.S...

...Rethinking Labor's Strategy Not long ago I was told about a debate raging among the top political organizers of one of the larger AFL-CIO affiliates, a union that traditionally sent sizable delegations to the Democratic National Convention and is easily capable of doing the same again...

...On too many occasions organized labor, unable to reach any kind of consensus, comes down decisively on both sides of an issue...

...The chief challenge we face is to define ourselves as more than servicing institutions that negotiate contracts by becoming organizations that speak to a broader range of worker concerns, both on and off the job...

...Every four years we dump who knows how much money into sending people to the Democratic convention," one of the union's seasoned political organizers observed, "but the only thing we ever seem to get out of it is the right to say, 'Look how many people we had there.' " Though long characterized—even by some of its friends—as slow to accept change, labor is engaged in an almost unprecedented reexamination of its political strategies...

...Living up to the challenge of making campaigns like Wofford's more than the exception to the rule involves making significant changes in how we view ourselves and labor's mission...

...For much of organized labor, rethinking the relationship between America's unions and these Democrats has meant adopting tough criteria for withholding union support from politicians who refuse to back our agenda...

...Last year, the AFL-CIO launched a similar program nationally...

...Senate race underscores why...

...Pointing to the successes of Canada's New Democrats, supporters say that America's "old Democrats" can also be elbowed aside in favor of candidates who will stand up for our issues...

...Though today it's accepted as a given that Wofford successfully campaigned on a platform that could have been written at the convention of any U.S...

...That was the lesson UMWA members learned a couple of years ago when, in the midst of the union's strike at the Pittston Coal Group, union activists decided to take on Don McGlothin, Sr., heir to one of southwest Virginia's most distinguished political families and a twentyyear incumbent in the state's House of Delegates...

...Similar conflicts occur routinely whenever teachers and construction unions battle over property tax abatements for local building projects or when a privatization proposal that would cost jobs for one union could just as easily create them for another...

...Though Connecticut labor leaders successfully pressed legislators to launch a state income tax, more than 45,000 residents denounced it at a rally financed in part by a key local of one of the state's largest private-sector unions...

...Many union leaders have responded to our declining membership not by exploring our movement's ability to adapt and change but by invoking the image of a pendulum that's bound to come back our way...

...According to the survey of 612 white Louisiana voters, racial issues consistently were of less concern to Duke supporters than their sense that government had abandoned them...

...Today, organized labor faces an indifference bordering on contempt from a new generation of Democrats who grew up as children of the very middle class that young CIO organizers made possible a few decades before...

...In the public sector, state and local government employees have seen scores of Democratic officials—some whose very careers were financed through union campaigns—respond to budget shortfalls by scapegoating government workers rather than by challenging low corporate tax rates...

...However, despite this, our influence in Congress and in the state capitals continues to decline...

...Senate incumbent must raise $20,000 each week to wage a credible reelection bid, few candidates can be expected to turn their backs on corporate interests...

...Ironically, the economic hardship that motivated many of Duke's white middle-class backers finally led many to vote for Edwards...

...Through MFD, nonunion miners have an opportunity to join with the UMWA as associate members where they have both access to the union's resources and a vehicle to make their voices heard in local politics...

...With some two thousand members, the group is spearheading local support for a state universal health care plan...

...But on the eve of the 1992 campaign the Democratic party of the Humphreys and Kennedys— a party that could champion farm workers in Delano or sanitation workers in Memphis—is the stuff of 1960s nostalgia...

...Somewhat to the left on questions of civil liberties, defense, and the environment, but far closer to corporate America when it comes to economic policy, they are cultural liberals who offer a politics vaguely reminiscent of 1980 presidential candidate John Anderson...

...Ironically this is occurring at a time when organized labor is raising and contributing more money than ever before—one published estimate even says that eleven of the wealthiest union PACs (Political Action Committees) contributed between $2 million and $5 million each over the last ten years...

...In Cincinnati, the local AFL-CIO labor council launched its own community organizing program under the banner of the National Association of Working Americans...

...To many of this generation of Democrats, the labor movement was less a vehicle for economic security—let alone social justice— WINTER • 1992 • 57 Rethinking Labor's Strategy than it was Lyndon Johnson's silent partner...

...We launched a campaign for Jackie Stump — a coal miner and UMWA International Executive Board member...

...Today we long for the "good old days" when Democrats took their leadership from veteran New Dealers and when the image of Bobby Kennedy marching shoulder to shoulder with Cesar Chavez convinced us that the coalition forged by John L. Lewis and Franklin D. Roosevelt had become a permanent fixture in American life...

...Though their parents may have lived in the shadow of the Great Depression, these Democrats grew up in a time of relative prosperity...

...The result was that Stump easily defeated McGlothin by a greater than two-to-one majority...

...House candidates totaled nearly $35 million, but those dollars become chump change compared to the $58 million dished out by corporate PACs and the additional $44 million from trade association and professional PACs...

...industrial union, even more significant was the fact that long before Richard Thornburgh even entered the Senate race, Pennsylvania unions dug in their heels behind Harris Wofford and his populism when many party professionals advocated a far more WINTER • 1992 • 59 Rethinking Labor's Strategy cautious approach and, in some cases, even another candidate...

...Approaches like these, still more the exception than the rule, offer a passing glimpse into a new kind of labor movement: one that can exercise political strength based not on dollars but on grass-roots support...

...It's an approach the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and a growing number of unions are putting to work today: it's called running our own as Democrats and, when necessary, as independents...

...It should be little surprise that of the arguments used against Duke in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial contest it was the threat of additional job loss that appears to have moved middle-class white voters to support Democrat Edwin Edwards...

...When the average U.S...

...60 • DISSENT...

...Calling the approach "community unionism," Reuther suggested that "properly nurtured and motivated, it can spread across the face of the nation, changing the social character of the inner city structure, providing the poor with their own self-sufficient economic organization...

...Examples of this new kind of unionism remain few and far between, but its success may offer new hope for labor's resurgence...

...In Boston, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees last year pioneered in establishing a housing trust fund that has already put a hundred families into new homes...

...However, while the radical right believes labor's political campaign dollars are vital to the survival of the Democratic party, fewer of those on the receiving end behave as if this were true...

...Meanwhile, rank-and-file union activists mounted an aggressive door-to-door canvassing drive and organized the same phone bank operations unions traditionally place at the disposal of Democratic candidates...

...And for good reason...

...But McGlothin, like many Democrats, was more than content to gamble that his incumbency and poor Republican organization would allow him to avoid the region's most controversial issue: Pittston's drive to deprive coal-mining families of their health benefits...

...Even on questions where Democratic support might have once been a given—banning the "permanent replacements" of striking workers, for example— union lobbyists often find legislators they had endorsed nearly as intractable as those they'd opposed...

...Stump's campaign demonstrated that labor can successfully employ the same techniques as any other campaign organization...