HTML> Labor Wants Out of the Limelight After Glare of Probes, Backlash - March 28, 1998
Barnes & Nobleinfoseekad

Home
AllPolitics
 

 Home
 News
 Analysis
 Community
 CNN.com

Related Stories

 Click here for more Congressional Quarterly's in-depth political coverage.


Search


  Help

Labor Wants Out of the Limelight After Glare of Probes, Backlash

By Alan Greenblatt, CQ Staff Writer

Democrat Baron Hill, a one-time high school basketball star who is running for Congress in southeastern Indiana, bobs, weaves and spins when asked about the heavy financial support his campaign has received from organized labor.

"I'm not running to carry labor's agenda in particular," Hill said. "I'm delighted to have labor support, as well as I have business support."

Hill's main opponent in the race to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Lee H. Hamilton is Republican former state Sen. Jean Leising, who is castigating Hill for the company he keeps. Leising said that much of Hill's campaign treasury is being underwritten by labor, along with that other unpopular, deep-pocketed Democratic constituency -- trial lawyers.

"Maybe she thinks I'm a poster boy for labor," said Hill, a former state representative who had received more than $60,000 from labor by the end of 1997 for his congressional race (more than Leising had raised in toto). "If she's making that assumption, then she's wrong."

Unions are accustomed to being vilified in an election season. But now organized labor, which made a much publicized splash during the 1996 election cycle as the top contributor of money and manpower to Democratic House candidates, is beginning to circle its wagons. "Their view seems to be that, given all the pressure on them, they're probably better off not having too big a profile," said Ruy A. Teixeira, an elections analyst at the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute.

The current climate for labor stands in contrast with some heady days during 1996 and into 1997.

In the summer of 1996, unions watched with glee as Congress voted to increase the minimum wage after a protracted fight. Fresh off that triumph, they spent millions freely that fall in campaigns against targeted Republicans.

And in August 1997, the Teamsters Union enjoyed unaccustomed public support in a successful strike against United Parcel Service.

The icing on labor's cake came in November 1997, when it teamed up with environmentalists and other Democratic constituents to torpedo the bill to extend the president's "fast track" trade negotiating authority. That victory was one of the few occasions when labor has broken with the Clinton administration since the GOP took control of Congress in 1995. President Clinton paid homage to the union movement at the AFL-CIO's Las Vegas convention the week of March 16, as did two of his would-be successors, Vice President Al Gore and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, D-Mo.

"Today, more than ever before, the state of our union depends on the state of our unions," Gore told a convention of California Democrats on March 21.

But unions are now under attack on several political and legal fronts. The Justice Department and congressional committees are investigating the Teamsters for election finance violations -- a scandal that has cost Ron Carey the presidency of the union and threatens to engulf Richard Trumka, the second-ranking official at the AFL-CIO. And Democrats who have accepted campaign contributions from the Laborers Union have regularly been pummeled with charges that they are connected to mobsters, since its president, Arthur Coia, allegedly has ties to organized crime. The Justice Department is overseeing the union in an attempt to rid it of corruption and mob influence. Now, through legislative initiatives in Congress and lively state ballot fights, Republicans are making every effort to severely restrict the flow of union money into campaigns.

"The role that unions play is a reality that Republicans have to constantly confront," said Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, R-Maine. "They have a get out the vote effort that's second to none."

This year, initiatives that would require unions to receive prior consent from members before spending dues on political activity will be on the ballot in several states, most notably in California, where a June ballot fight could cost labor as much as $20 million.

"I think that initiative is a big-business reaction to the successes of labor in 1996," said Dana Frank, a labor historian at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Given this state of siege, organized labor has become more willing in recent years to support candidates such as Hill, who says he cares as much about small business concerns as unions. Indiana's 9th District is largely rural, but unions have a presence in manufacturing plants and woodwork shops that make everything from caskets to baseball bats.

A candidate such as Hill can still count on labor dollars.The AFL-CIO currently has $15 million in its political bank accounts and is expected to spend as much this year as it did in 1996 with its widely publicized $35 million ad campaign. "I do believe that having more experience with the Republican Congress has tempered labor's criticism, or at least moderated their position, in respect to Democrats who don't agree with them on every issue," said Peter Seybold, director of the division of labor studies at Indiana University.

Labor and its Democratic allies in Congress have succeeded in blocking major Republican attempts at rewriting labor law, including a plan to allow employers to give workers compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay, as well as efforts to overturn the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, which requires federal contractors to pay locally prevailing wages -- generally interpreted as union scale.

Still, having to depend on sometimes fickle political friends has some labor strategists wondering if their money and effort would not be better spent getting their own members educated and actively engaged in fights over specific issues, rather than concentrating on television ads in support of such candidates.

"There's so much proof that the labor movement can have a success when it's willing to pick up a banner and stand for something, and so little success when it tries to play the internal politics game," said Mike Parker, author of several books on labor-management relations. Exaggerated Clout

John Sweeney's ascension (he took over as AFL-CIO president in 1995) has meant a more aggressive public face for unions. Nowhere have they made a bigger splash than in the political realm, where their efforts in 1996 were front-page news.

Organized labor was the Democratic Party's readiest source of money and manpower in the 1996 cycle, providing at least $45 million in direct donations to House Democratic candidates, contributing nearly half (48 percent) of the money they raised from political action committees (PACs).

And the value of in-kind contributions from unions -- the help offered candidates by union members passing out leaflets, staffing phone banks and otherwise aiding voter identification and turnout efforts -- "dwarf their cash outlays," according to Rutgers University economist Leo Troy.

Troy has estimated that the total value of labor's political contributions in the 1996 cycle may have topped $300 million. (The total amount of reported funds organized labor contributed came to $119 million.)

The costs of administering labor and business-related PACS, as well as fundraising costs, are eaten by the respective unions and corporations themselves, and do not count against those PACs' expenditures. (Box, p. 788)

Business spends about nine times as much as labor in the political arena, but Lonnie Taylor, a lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, says that labor enjoys an advantage.

"They have this power that business doesn't," he said. "They get involved spending mandatory dues from their workers, and we can't do that."

But such claims likely overstate the case. For one thing, labor was less effective than it would have liked in 1996; despite independent expenditure campaigns that topped the million-dollar mark in some districts, only 13 of the 32 Republican House incumbents the AFL-CIO targeted were defeated.

And unions and their allies say that business interests purposely exaggerate labor's clout, building unions up as a bogyman for fundraising purposes.

A new group sponsoring pro-business issue advertising called Americans for Job Security was established by insurance companies and other businesses in October as a direct counter to labor's influence, and says it will spend up to $12 million on races this year.

"It's laughable to believe that labor, with all of its foot soldiers, can outdo a 9- or 10-to-1-dollar disadvantage, which is essentially what is occurring in these races," said state Rep. Eric N. Vitaliano, D-N.Y., a longtime labor ally who lost a special congressional election in November. The "threat" of labor may be more imagined than real, agreed Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the Washington-based workers' advocacy group, Campaign for America's Future. "The idea that you can organize the troops is the potential of labor, not the truth," he said. "Labor is coming back from some pretty poor showings, and has a long way to go before they can make good the paranoia."

Labor's Party

Unions today represent barely 10 percent of the private workforce, and by 1996 the unionized share of self-identified Democrats was down to 11 percent from 32 percent in 1960. Labor's political muscle has atrophied concomitantly. Labor's power within Democratic circles grew along with its membership during the Depression. By 1944, Republicans enjoyed taunting President Franklin D. Roosevelt that in selecting his running mate he first had to "clear it with Sidney," a reference to Sidney Hillman, head of the old Congress of Industrial Organizations' (CIO) PAC.

The last indisputably great election year for labor came fully four decades ago. In 1958, union-friendly candidates smothered the GOP, dropping Republican ranks to barely one-third of either chamber in Congress and beginning the shift of power within the Democratic Party away from Southern conservatives toward members favoring a more activist agenda.

But soon enough, events of the 1960s drove a wedge between unions and the rest of the New Deal coalition. People drawn to politics because of civil rights, feminism and the Vietnam War had a different definition of liberal Democrat and succeeded in dethroning the unions as the party's dominant force by the 1972 convention.

But the factions found they had more in common with each other than the Republicans who dominated the White House during the 1980s and took control of Congress in 1994.

Despite its disputes with the Clinton administration on trade policy, organized labor is walking arm in arm with the Democrats on a broad domestic agenda of raising the minimum wage for the second time in three years, increasing access to health and child care and protecting Social Security benefits.

"The national agenda that the White House and the congressional Democrats are talking about are the concerns of working folks," said Democratic consultant Bob Doyle.

Today, of all the party's factions, only labor has significant capital to spend on elections. So with the Democratic National Committee saddled with a $9 million debt, organized labor remains a singularly important source of campaign funds for Democratic candidates in tight races.

"It would benefit labor to be more stealthy about it, not to be as out front about it, not give the other side a tactical advantage knowing where they're going to play," Doyle said.

Democrats in general can look forward to being outspent by their Republican rivals this year, and labor unions and other Democratic allies will consequently be picking their fights with care.

"The contested races will gain a concentration of everyone's attention, and in that concentration Democrats have to be worried about being outspent overwhelmingly," Borosage said. "Labor is going to try to at least get Democratic candidates over the threshold so they're visible, part of the game."

Increasing Turnout

Labor, along with other interest groups across the political spectrum, is searching for those issues that can fire up its membership in an era when divided control and a rising economy leave partisans lacking for obvious conflicts.

"They've got a mobilization-predicated strategy, but you can't just yell and scream to everybody, 'Get out and vote,' " Teixeira said. "You have to give them some compelling reason to do so."

Unions are therefore pursuing some new strategies, most of which are bubbling up from below the ranks of top union leadership, to engage its members and motivate other allies such as women's and civil rights groups.

They are fighting at the city level to ensure that public contractors pay workers a "living wage" -- at least the amount needed to sustain a family of four at the poverty line. The campaign, backed by labor and religious groups, has been successful in cities such as Boston, Milwaukee and San Jose, Calif.

In Ohio, unions sponsored a successful ballot initiative in November that restored certain workers' compensation benefits that had been curtailed by the state legislature.

"Somehow we have to make sure that people understand, and get the message to voters, that without organized labor ordinary working people often have no voice at all," said Bill Burga, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO.

Burga was particularly cheered by a March 10 Ohio appellate court ruling that threw out key portions of a 1995 law that restricted the funds unions could donate to state candidates, including a provision that blocked unions from using members' dues for campaign contributions.

Few union members take advantage of a 1988 Supreme Court decision in Beck v. Communication Workers of America that allows them to withhold the portion of their dues that would go to political activity. So Republicans are seeking to offer paycheck protection by requiring unions to receive prior consent of members before dues can be devoted to politics.

Paycheck protection was the GOP's counter-volley to an overhaul of campaign finance law, supported mostly by Democrats, which died in the Senate in February. The House is scheduled to vote on a campaign finance bill containing a similar provision on March 30. The House passed legislation March 26 that would prevent unions from placing workers in shops strictly for the purpose of organizing. The proposal is veto-bait with a Democrat in the White House, but similar language has been adopted by voters in Washington state and will appear on several other states' ballots this year, most notably in California as Proposition 226.

"That will be a body blow to the union movement regarding political activities," predicts Troy of Rutgers.

Even if Proposition 226 fails -- and early polling indicates it might pass by landslide proportions -- a $20 million expenditure by unions to fight it means significant sums that cannot be spent elsewhere. It also may drain a good deal of labor's political time and energy.

Troy and other labor critics point to the precipitous drop in the number of Washington Education Association (WEA) members who contributed to political activity after Washington state voters approved a paycheck protection ballot initiative in 1992, from 48,000 to 8,000.

Like many other campaign finance "reform" efforts, however, that initiative did not stanch the flow of money. WEA settled a case with the state attorney general's office after it was revealed that the National Education Association had improperly spent funds for the WEA's campaign against voucher and charter school ballot initiatives in 1996.

The teachers' union succeeded in defeating both those initiatives.

"They have not stopped WEA from being involved in politics," said WEA communications director Trevor Neilson. "Many of their attacks have galvanized our membership."

Pending Legislation HR1385; S1186: Consolidate job training programs. HR1; S4: Allow employers to offer compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay. HR2579; S1237: Shift the focus of OSHA from enforcing workplace laws to consulting with employers on problems.HR3510; S1805: Minimum wage increase from $5.15 to $6.15. HR3246: Prevent union "salting" in workplaces with organizers. HR1625; HR3485; S9: Require membership permission before using dues for political purposes. HR634; S295: Relax limits on labor-management teams.

© 1998 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.
In CQ News This Week

Saturday March 28, 1998

Burial Restrictions Pass House
Bono, Lee Look Poised To Join Largest Female Delegation
Labor Wants Out of the Limelight After Glare of Probes, Backlash
A Montana Man's Senate
Clinton Scandal, Starr Probe Trickle Down Into Elections


Archives   |   CQ News   |   TIME On Politics   |   Feedback   |   Help

Copyright © 1998 AllPolitics All Rights Reserved.
Terms under which this information is provided to you.
Read our privacy guidelines.
Who we are.