Labor leaders say recall will harm workers

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Sep 2, 2003 | by Megan Garvey, Los Angeles Times

California's labor leaders, who have pledged a $5 million effort to defeat the Oct. 7 recall of Gov. Gray Davis, aren't asking union members to love their current governor.

Instead, they are warning their 2.6 million members that what is at stake is not just Davis' job, but their own.

In anti-recall events across the state, and in messages transmitted by phone banks and campaign mailers, the unions are focusing on workplace issues they believe will bring their members to the polls.

They stress specifics such as rules on overtime, which are more generous than those elsewhere in the country; enforcement of workplace safety rules; and policies governing how much employers with state contracts must pay their workers. On each of those, Davis, a Democrat, has reversed Republican policies that union leaders said hurt their members.

And in keeping with an overall Democratic strategy, they are trying to make former Gov. Pete Wilson, Davis' predecessor, a focus of the campaign. Union leaders fought repeatedly with Wilson, a Republican, and they are eager to stress Wilson's ties to Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

One widely distributed flier shows Wilson's face pasted onto Schwarzenegger's muscled body. "I'm Back!" it warns, going on to list pro-labor policies that union leaders say Wilson "terminated" or at least attempted to end. "This time I'll finish the job!" the "Wilson" character on the flier warns.

The approach appears to have struck a chord with at least some union members. "How upset am I about what's going on?" said Tom Lickfelt, 60, a longtime member of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 11. "I live in Florida now, and I made sure I came back to help get out the vote. I'm here for the duration."

Union organizers say the key to defeating the recall will be tapping into the sentiments of rank and file members like Lickfelt.

"We are saying that it's a horrible manipulation of the process, that the people behind it are anti-worker," said John Perez of the United Food and Commercial Workers. "Our members understand that it's nothing more than a power grab by right-wingers."

Through phone calls -- 3 million of which are planned -- as well as tens of thousands of job site fliers, direct mail, precinct walks and one-on-one conversations, union officials hope to portray the recall as damaging to their members pocketbooks.

"We have to talk to them about their jobs," said Jerry Vaughn, political director of Service Employees International Union Local 660, which represents many low-paid workers. "We have to talk about exactly what's at stake here."

The issues involved have been points of contention between unions and employer groups for the last decade.

One involves California's eight-hour day rule. Most states and the federal government require overtime to be paid to hourly workers after 40 hours worked in a week. California, by contrast, since 1918 has required overtime to be paid after eight hours in a day.

During the 1990s, business groups argued that the rule had become outdated and failed to give companies the flexibility they needed to compete. After several years of lobbying by business, a commission appointed by Wilson finally eliminated the rule in 1997. In his first term as governor two years later, Davis signed legislation putting the eight-hour rule back into effect.

A second pay-related issue involves government contracts. State rules require that companies that do work for the government must pay "prevailing wages." The rule is designed to prevent non-unioned companies from getting contracts by being able to bid less than unionized companies.

Wilson sought to change the definition of prevailing wages to allow contractors to pay workers less. He argued prevailing wage law was inflating construction costs and harming the state budget. Davis, by contrast, signed legislation backed by unions that expanded the prevailing-wage requirements.

And on workplace safety, union leaders insist that Republican administrations went easy on businesses that failed to abide by regulations. Under Davis, enforcement has been more vigorous, they say.

"This is very much a political fight," said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. "I think that the conflict is pretty open. Pete Wilson clearly saw unions as a threat to his agenda and the Republican Party, and he worked hard to diminish that strength."

But John Duncan, who served as Wilson's last director of the Department Industrial Relations, the state agency that oversees labor conditions, said Wilson's record has been distorted by union leaders.

"I think there's somewhat of a desperate strategy going on right now," Duncan said. "There is a balance to the things they point to in a completely exaggerated fashion."

On safety, Duncan said state labor officials under Wilson conducted high-profile raids on the garment industry, enforced minimum standards and took a balanced approach to job site safety.

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Duncan said he was "not surprised there is a demonization going on. The organizers of the AFL-CIO have had pretty strong reign for the last five years. But we now have a huge deficit and some laws on the books that are causing businesses to relocate outside of California. Those are real issues."