Campaign-finance reform may quell unions' activism

Insight on the News, Jan 27, 1997 by Susan Crabtree

Spending by unions is almost exclusively ideological, as seen in the AFL-CIO's $35 million anti-GOP campaign. Republicans in the 105th Congress plan to change campaign-expenditure and disclosure laws.

We've already begun to devote more and more resources and energy to organizing and to politics -- the twin towers of our salvation," John Sweeney announced on Oct. 26, 1995. With those words, the newly elected AFLCIO president began a nationwide effort to awaken the sleeping organized-labor giant in time for the 1996 elections.

But for all the sound and fury Sweeney generated during this election cycle -- including the much-ballyhooed $35 million pledged to spend against targeted House Republican freshmen -- more than 80 percent of those freshmen remained standing 13 months later. Of course, both sides claimed victory. Republicans noted that they retained their majority and snickered that the unions got little for their multi-million-dollar expenditure. The unions, however. boasted that they had startled Republicans and declared the congressional seats they recovered to be victory enough. They warned that this year's political display was just the beginning of a new era of union political activism -- that the labor giant was back on its feet and would not slumber again.

Aside from who won and lost, campaign 1996 -- an election in which more money was raised and spent than ever before -- has produced strong popular demand for campaign finance reform. And although President Clinton has drawn the most scrutiny for his Indonesian connections, the unions also have inspired vehement calls for reform. Rutgers University economics professor Leo Troy's now-legendary estimate that unions could turn out to have spent as much as $300 million to $500 million during this past election cycle sounded the call to arms for a Republican counterattack, triggering demand for laws to disclose and limit such political expenditures.

The AFL-CIO still claims to have spent just $35 million this past election season. But it is impossible to verify that assertion because so much of the money spent in elections need not be reported to the Federal Election Commission, or FEC. Analysts only can estimate the massive union expenditures by tracking the tens of millions in television and radio advertising, salaries of union members put to political tasks in congressional districts, the cost of printing and distributing vast numbers of "voter guides," as well as additional dollars spent on get-out-the-vote efforts including transporting friendly voters to the polls, registering likely Democratic voters and phone-banking.

Considering that 75 separate national unions were listed in FEC records as making independent reportable contributions -- from the Airline Pilots Association to the Warehouse Employees Union -- the national AFL-CIO money is only one cog on the vast organized-labor political machine. And, since the last campaign dollar was spent, a number of, scholars, political conservatives and former union workers have backed Troy's estimate that the total spending by unions last year snowballed into an avalanche of hundreds of millions.

Most of the AFL-CIO fund to defeat the GOP freshmen was spent on an elaborate radio and television advertising campaign in congressional districts across the country. But during a speech to the Conservative Leadership Conference, Reed Larson, president of the National Right to Work Committee, said it is unlikely that a mere $35 million covered the tab for even the airwave assault.

Indeed, newspapers across the country have been citing substantial discrepancies in the union claims. In Ohio's 10th District, the AFL-CIO told the New York Times on Oct. 11, 1996, it spent $385,000 on TV advertising between April and September. But an ad-tracking agency told the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC, that the AFLCIO actually spent $1.2 million on TV ads in the district during that period to defeat Republican Rep. Martin Hoke.

As the Times noted, "By any standard, it is a lot of money, especially when Hoke's opponent, Dennis Kucinich, estimates he spent only $300,000 on his campaign.... And it is only part" of the union effort in the 10th District. The Times found that the AFL-CIO also was spending money on a host of other activities ranging from phone banks making "persuasion calls" to union members and retirees to door-to-door canvassing in heavily pro-labor precincts to recruiting volunteers to help in anti-Republican campaigns.

AFL-CIO spokeswoman Deborah Dion insists that the organization confined its spending to $35 million. She says that the ad-tracking agency that discovered the discrepancies was hired by the Republican National Committee to do its bidding. "The ad agency who tracked these things put out incredibly erroneous material" she says. "They had us in districts where we didn't even have ads. I don't know how they did their tracking ... every single number they came up with was way off." But when asked to provide a list of the sums of money the AFL-CIO spent in each district, Dion declined.