How Powerful Are Unions in Politics

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 9, 1998 | by Sean Paige

Big labor may be down, but it certainly is net out. When push comes to shove, unions still can be effective, bare-knuckle brawlers in the thick of the political action.

Big labor sometimes seems up against the ropes, a punchy political heavyweight well beyond its prizefighting prime. But it's still a vicious counterpuncher when it is backed into a corner u proved by last year's come-from-behind knockout of Proposition 226, California's labor-busting ballot initiative -- and can't be counted out when survival is perceived to be at stake.

While hardly anyone believes the elections of 1998 are a make-or-break test of big labor's staying power -- and some even argue that it has little motivation for pulling out all the stops this time around -- the midterm elections were seen by many as a test of whether unions can recover the brawler style that long made them a contender.

Every major labor union contacted by Insight professed to be fully mobilized for action in the campaign season. They pointed to the $31 million in political-action committee, or PAC, contributions the unions had made to federal candidates as of Oct. 1 (more than 90 percent of it to Democrats), millions of dollars more spent on issue ads, phone banks, flurries of direct mail and AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney's back-to-basics emphasis on grass-roots organizing.

But other observers aren't convinced. They say the Clinton scandals have neutralized issues likely to energize union voters and point to studies that show unions have trouble consistently delivering the votes of their dwindling rank and file. These critics believe that union backing means increasingly less to candidates.

When all is said and done, most observers say big labor's success or failure in this round ultimately must be measured in terms of seats gained or lost by Democrats, whom unions predominantly back against Republicans. Democratic Party gains or even modest losses will be spun as successes against predicted Republican advances and a continuation of the hot hand labor has had since the campaign of 1996 -- a campaign which the media widely perceived as a resounding success for unions and a harbinger of their return to form. Other recent "wins" for big labor include 1997's seemingly effortless hiking of the minimum wage and last year's crushing of Proposition 226, dubbed by supporters "paycheck protection," because it would have allowed union members to withhold the portion of union dues used for political activities.

"Proposition 226 was a clear sign that Republicans and conservatives want to limit the financial underpinning of unions," says Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Wooster, Mass., and "a strong filibuster-proof Senate is what they are really worried about now" because it likely would lead to other Republican legislative attempts to defend union political coffers. "Unions have to use their political clout now or lose it," according to Chaison.

"There still is a union effect, but it's not as broad as it used to be because of declining union membership," counters Alan L. Draper, a professor of government at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who points out that union members make up only 14 percent of the workforce. Draper believes that unions have little to prove after Proposition 226 and wisely are conserving their strength for targeted fights directly related to job security, wages and trade. "In the absence of such union-security issues, I'm not sure union leadership is going to be very galvanized about this election," Draper says. "But they are still effective when they reach out to the public," as they did in the California fight, and at "framing the issues in terms of right-to-work referenda and elections having to do with union security."

And besides, Draper points out, Republican electoral gains actually have strengthened labor's hand where it matters most. "Once Republicans came to power, business PAC money shifted toward the GOP, which meant Democratic candidates -- incumbents as well as challengers -- were more reliant on labor than they used to be," Draper says.

But many more militant union members have come to resent that reliance, says Chaison, and openly are questioning the Democratic Party's commitment to their interests. "Some people in the labor movement see Clintonites as neoliberals who are promoting internationalist trade policies, welfare reform and other issues that can jeopardize union jobs," Chaison tells Insight, and have failed to fight for labor-law reforms that unions see as crucial to their ability to organize.

Another response to the alienation labor activists are feeling has been an ostensibly less partisan posture toward candidates being taken by some major unions, most notably the Teamsters, who say publicly they will put their money, volunteers and votes behind whichever candidate looks out for the interest of their members. Of course, Republicans still rarely qualify for such support -- less than 10 percent of union PAC contributions went to GOP campaigners in the current election cycle, even though a number of Republican candidates are opposed to the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade pacts the unions regard as poison. But the tactic of proposing to help even GOP friends of labor has been effective at neutralizing some Republicans who imagined they actually might win union support, Chaison says, while letting Democrats know that union backing can't be taken for granted.