African Americans, Women, Workers: racial bias and the labor movement
Meyerson, Harold
IN THE SPRING Of 1995, when Lane Kirkland's old order was toppling and John Sweeney's young(er) Turks were poised to revitalize the American labor movement, one of the movement's leading...
...There's a lot of jostling, a lot of egos, more mistrust, more maneuvering required to get things done...
...The unions will mail and phone their members plenty, but in this election, more than ever before, they will rely DECISION ' 08 on workplace contacts between local union leaders and stewards and their members...
...We can't call them racist," says one leader who attended the meeting...
...Endorsing a candidate two weeks before the election doesn't work," says Steve Rosenthal, who rebuilt the AFL-CIO's political program in the late nineties...
...But the Alliance will be putting out political messages and programs of its own—something that the Steelworkers and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Communications Workers do quite well, though the UAW, in qualitative as well as quantitative decline, no longer does it well at all...
...And what the unions found DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 4 1 DECISION ' 08 is that their black members voted for Obama no matter what the Jerry McEntees told them, and their Appalachian white members in Pennsylvania and Ohio voted for Clinton because they didn't want to vote for a black man...
...In the primaries, this was a gap—a yawning gulf, actually— that the union movement (at least, the Change to Win unions that endorsed Obama late in the game) was clearly unable to bridge...
...And as layoffs in the once-great industrial unions proceed by seniority, the median age in the unions in those sectors rises as well...
...The unions, of course, can't do it alone...
...If the key to winning enough working-class white votes is for local leaders and stewards to sit down with their members and talk about McCain's and Obama's records, that requires placing a lot of trust—not just information—in the local union leaders...
...The unions have had some major success stories: getting supermajorities from white as well as black members for liberal Democratic national and state candidates in Michigan for decades and beating back the George Wallace surge of 1968 to deliver the industrial Midwest to Hubert Humphrey, to cite just two instances...
...The one thing that labor has done very well—and it's been doing it for years—has been to line up support for EFCA from the vast majority of Democratic candidates for federal office...
...A decade later, a second revolt broke out, led by Sweeney's own union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU...
...Much has been made of the class division among white Democrats on the Obama question, but the starker contrast is that between workingclass whites and working-class blacks...
...Within the labor movement, CWA president Larry Cohen has been the most unflagging proponent of EFCA...
...At McEntee's behest, AFSCME not only waged an intense battle for Clinton, but put out material that attacked Obama at every turn, precipitating an open intra-union revolt, and raising hackles within a union that has a large African American membership...
...As he remakes the Democratic Party, he must find in himself just enough old-time populist religion to forge a new majority...
...What's disturbing is how poorly America's unions performed in the Democratic primaries and how divided they are as they go into the fall...
...The Sweeney regime turned the AFL-CIO into a more effective electoral machine than it had ever been and it repositioned the labor movement to be part—in some ways, the center-of a grand liberal coalition alongside feminists, environmentalists, and the whole lefty crew...
...The average UAW auto worker is now over fifty...
...In 2004 and 2006, Working America members voted for union-endorsed candidates at roughly the same rate that union members did, and the AFL-CIO has expanded the program accordingly...
...rOR, EVEN though Obama has activated a new generation and a new coalition in American politics, geography and demographics have made him—and all who want him to win—reliant on the last survivor of the New Deal coalition, the unions, to win the older, white working-class voters he needs to carry the industrial Midwest...
...The amount of racism among our older white members in those states is extraordinary," another union leader acknowledges...
...Just a few days before the Nevada caucuses, for instance, UNITE-HERE, with which the massive Las Vegas hotel workers union is affiliated, endorsed Obama, for reasons that had as much to do with the national union's internal politics as anything else...
...Similarly, when John Edwards suspended his candidacy shortly before Super Tuesday, California SEIU, which has close to 700,000 members in state, endorsed Obama who then proceeded to lose California's union vote to Clinton by a wide margin...
...Under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers had to work overtime to keep its Appalachian members and its black members from attacking each other in and around the newly integrated defense factories during the Second World War...
...Just as unions use local union leaders to talk to members in worksites, Working America hires its canvassers from the local communities...
...Potentially, plenty...
...And John McCain...
...As is often the case with Change to Win unions, their local affiliates will probably do a good deal of work under the aegis of the local AFL-CIO labor council...
...Those include not only key presidential battleground states, but also Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, where Senate races whose outcomes could determine the fate of EFCA are up for grabs...
...At the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Clinton's candidacy had a particular resonance for the heavily female membership...
...we're just trying to give folks a comfort level so that they're able to do what they know they should be doing...
...HAROLD MEYERSON is national editor of the American Prospect and a columnist for the Washington Post...
...The 450 recruiters bring in a stunning 58,000 new members each week, a feat made possible by having a mind-boggling sign-up rate of 67 percent...
...Most commentators assumed that the endorsement meant that Obama supporters would swamp the caucuses, but even at the caucuses held in the hotels, Clinton supporters fared very well...
...It's up to Obama to find a way to talk to white workers that convinces them he knows what it means when the flight of industry smashes your life, and that he's committed to enough public investment at home to revitalize dead regions...
...Beyond the institutional impediments to labor's delivering in November, doubts remain DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 43 DECISION ' 08 about the human factors as well...
...That's all well and good for union members, but the industrial Midwest is now home to more former union members than current ones—and the lists of former members grow with each successive Big Three buyout and plant closing...
...This fall, however, they have to, if Obama is to win the White House...
...To begin, labor goes into its doordie autumn more fractured than it's been in decades...
...But we do think it's doable...
...Instead, they have started their own group, called the Alliance, to channel their political resources and activities...
...In Ohio, says Working America director Karen Nussbaum, the group has 800,000 members...
...Labor isn't at 5 percent yet, though in the private sector, the share of union membership has reached a pathetic 7.5 percent...
...Most unions found few, if any, programmatic reasons to prefer one candidate to another— so other reasons determined their endorsements...
...We need to say there are hundreds of good reasons to vote for Barack and one bad reason to vote against him...
...S0 WHAT could go wrong...
...Since the early years of the Sweeney presidency, the AFL-CIO has sat candidates down with workers illegally fired for trying to join a union, made clear the dimensions of the problem, and shown the candidates the numbers on how much more pro-Democratic union voters are than their non-union counterparts...
...At the early August meeting of battlegroundstate union leaders, though, one told a story about a local leader who said if he tried to sell Obama to his members, they'd vote him out of his union office...
...This is our way to reconnect to the white working class," Nussbaum says, and, should Obama win, labor plans to enlist Working America members in the campaigns for EFCA and universal health insurance as well...
...And the older the white voter, the greater his or her resistance to voting for Obama...
...Like other Democrats, union members were divided by race, age, gender, and class when they went to the voting booth, and within each of those categories, no great gaps showed up between unionists and their nonunion peers...
...It was a breakthrough election for blacks and women...
...In the first instance, it's not clear that the unions' endorsements—often decided late in the game for tactical reasons—had much sway over their members...
...In this year's election, labor stands at Armageddon and battles for itself...
...When the actual voting began, then, in Iowa and New Hampshire, grouplets of unions were actively supporting Clinton or Edwards, while Obama, still considered both a long shot and a candidate with whom a number of labor leaders had yet to break bread, couldn't claim the backing of any major union...
...These are not campaigns that necessarily involve rank-and-file workers in a meaningful way, but they are clearly the only way unions can grow until the National Labor Relations Act is amended along the lines laid out in the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)—a laborbacked bill that would enable workers to organize without fear of being fired or harassed and compel recalcitrant employers to agree to a first contract with the union their workers have chosen...
...The Change to Win leaders pledged to reverse labor's decline by placing more emphasis on organizing and less on politics...
...It's not news to unions that many of their members who fit that demographic are not eager to vote for a black man...
...Among the Change to Win unions, there was more support for Edwards and Barack Obama, but not enough to get any union to endorse before the first round of primaries...
...The emergence of the Alliance alongside Change to Win, not to mention the fractured response of the union movement during the primary season, has led a number of longtime labor officials to bemoan the splintering of their movement and the AFL-CIO's growing lack of authority...
...All, for that matter, had mainstream labor-liberal voting records and all put forth versions of universal or near-universal health insurance...
...Getting white blue-collar voters to vote for an AfricanAmerican, to admit, tacitly, that he went further and did better than they did, is very difficult...
...This not-so-mini-secession has its roots in the dissatisfaction of the Alliance unions over the targeting of states...
...In the first week of August, the AFL-CIO convened a meeting of more than three hundred union leaders, staffers, and consultants from seventeen battleground states to talk, behind closed doors, about how to persuade their white members to vote for a black presidential candidate...
...The roots of the Alliance can be traced in part to the belief among leaders of its unions that the AFL-CIO's political program, long chaired by AFSCME's McEntee, doesn't pay enough attention to the needs of private sector unions...
...DECISION ' 08 Having gone through such a process, all eight Democratic presidential candidates in this cycle endorsed EFCA back in 2007...
...INDEED, IN TWO distinct ways, the labor movement's participation in this year's Democratic primary process didn't matter all that much...
...in Pennsylvania, 400,000...
...But even at the height of its power in the thirties and forties, not even the UAW could persuade its white members to vote for liberal candidates for Detroit city government, from which many Detroit whites wanted a police department that would keep blacks "in their place...
...Four unions—three of them among the Federation's largest: the Steelworkers, the Communications Workers, and the UAW— have declined to pay the added dues assessment the Federation enacted this year to support its political program...
...Some unions have managed to grow, however, in recent years, by practicing what might be called "Let's Make A Deal" unionism...
...And labor, which could move a big step closer to ending with a whimper should Obama lose, must find in itself a better way to grapple with the demons of racism than it ever has before...
...It takes work and time to move union members, particularly in primaries where all the candidates are pretty good...
...plainly, he didn't see his commitment shared as deeply or broadly as he thought it should be across the AFL-CIO...
...It's not just the split between the Change to Win unions and those of the AFL-CIO...
...What makes the unions' efforts even more critical, then, is the AFL-CIO's Working America program, a four-year-old effort to enroll workingclass nonunion members at their doorstep into a no-dues, non-workplace-related union as a way of communicating to them the same mail, phone, and doorstep messages that actual union members receive...
...The aggregate effects of the union's divided primary season efforts were hard to discern...
...The Alliance comprises unions whose members work largely in the private sector, for whom the passage of EFCA is more critical than for public sector unions (which can always organize by cutting a deal with the governor), and they wanted to lay the groundwork for EFCA's passage by campaigning in some swing Senate states that the AFLCIO did not rank so high...
...We're not trying to change four hundred years of racial bias...
...We didn't join the labor movement when it represented 20 percent of the work force," he said— and by "we," he meant a generation of more militant organizers, children of the sixties, who were then in their forties—"only to see it drift down to 5 percent on our watch...
...Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards had staked out a more pro-labor position on trade than the other major candidates and had spent the years since his vice-presidential run of 2004 on numerous picket lines, but that yielded him the endorsements of just a handful of major unions chiefly, the Steelworkers...
...We're very sober about our task here," says one union leader...
...We have one fractured, dysfunctional movement," says another...
...Three years later, however, the new federation, too, has still not figured out how to stop the sickening slide...
...At the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), President Jerry McEntee was personally close to Bill and Hillary Clinton...
...The AFL-CIO, which requires a two-thirds vote of its unions, weighted by membership, to endorse a presidential candidate, stayed out, as did Change to Win...
...Some other AFL-CIO unions were certain that Clinton had a lock on the nomination and that an endorsement was simply smart politics...
...Within SEIU, whose political program dwarfs that of any other union, some liberal state leaders supported Edwards, whom they saw as the most progressive of the major candidates...
...Getting to that comfort level involves dispelling some of the myths circulating about Obama...
...What we have going for us is the political environment...
...McEntee also pushed hard to get an AFL-CIO endorsement for Clinton at the Federation's March executive council meeting in San Diego, but by then, Obama was in the midst of his post-Super Tuesday winning streak, and the votes for Clinton just weren't there...
...Which brings us to the larger way in which union participation in the Democratic primaries didn't matter that much: This was the election in which race and gender—most particularly, race greatly outstripped class as the key demographic and the subject of discussion...
...As of Labor Day, Working America will have 2.5 million members (adding in other voters in the households, 4 million members), half of whom are in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan...
...In late summer, the AFL-CIO put out a mailing that unions could send to their members debunking some of those myths—that Obama is Muslim, that he took the oath of office on the Koran, that he won't pledge allegiance to the flag...
...42 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 Pennsylvania has the second-highest median age of any state (after Florida...
...As the industrial economies of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan have been shuttered over the past half century—sent south, sent overseas, or just plain closed—young people have left for more favorable economic climes...
...IN THE SPRING Of 1995, when Lane Kirkland's old order was toppling and John Sweeney's young(er) Turks were poised to revitalize the American labor movement, one of the movement's leading operatives gave me his take on what was behind the revolt...
...Now, there's near-unanimity that if EFCA doesn't pass—that is, if the November election fails to produce a Democratic president and close to 60 Democratic senators, which are the indisputable prerequisites for passing EFCA—that 5 percent figure may be just around the corner for the private sector...
...One thing unions have discovered through numerous surveys is that the familiarity and reliability of the source of such information is the crucial determinant as to whether the member will believe it...
...With employers able to obstruct worksite organizing campaigns at every turn, unions instead pour huge resources into campaigns to elect governors or mayors who then create agencies that regulate, say, home care workers or port truck 40 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 drivers, enabling the unions to bargain contracts for those workers with those agencies...
...There's no center of gravity anymore in the labor movement," says one...
...And we're asking them to cast their first vote for a black candidate for the office of president...
...Or unions wage corporate campaigns, bringing financial pressure on some major employers in hopes of obtaining a right to organize their workers without employer opposition...
...What it didn't do was arrest the relative decline in union membership...
...A few years back, during the Change to Win revolt, officials of the rebellious unions disparaged the AFL-CIO for pinning all its hopes on EFCA...
...A lot of these guys [and the vast majority of older members of industrial unions are male] have never voted for a black candidate in their lives," says one prominent union official...
...Now, there's a split within the AFLC10 itself...
Vol. 55 • September 2008 • No. 4
