http://www.alternet.org/story/43690/Unions Are Out in Force for the November Elections
By David Moberg, The Nation. Posted October 31, 2006.
Despite the AFL-CIO split following the 2004 election, labor unions are gearing up for the November elections like never before.
On a warm September evening, retired teacher Pat Ryan and community college maintenance worker Al Wesley were knocking on doors in a modest neighborhood of Austin, a town in the flat farm country of southern Minnesota. They were passing out leaflets to union members like themselves and identifying likely supporters of labor-backed candidates, such as Tim Walz. A teacher, union member and veteran of the Army National Guard, Walz is running a strong pro-worker, antiwar campaign against conservative Republican incumbent Gil Gutknecht.
Walz is counting on union troops like Ryan, who worked across the hall from him, and Wesley, a vet whose daughter is now in Iraq and whose politics were shaped twenty-one years ago by his participation in a high-profile strike against the Austin Hormel plant. "A good portion of our electoral strategy hinges on organized labor," Walz says, "and we've said all along that organized labor issues are not just union issues. They're American worker issues." In Congressional races across the country, especially key contests in the Midwest and Northeast, Democratic candidates similarly depend on the political effectiveness of a shrinking labor movement that split apart a year ago.
Broad sentiment against Bush and misgivings about the war have opened up rare opportunities for Democrats, but in a non-presidential year with Republicans strengthening their turnout strategies, they will need a mighty push from grassroots voter mobilization. And no push is more important than labor's. The good news for Democrats is that despite its problems, organized labor is mounting a record effort, maintaining roughly the same level of union political cooperation as before the split, and finding new ways to expand its influence.
Despite the split, the AFL-CIO did not reduce its $40 million budget for this election cycle, the largest ever in a nonpresidential year. And while labor concentrated on sixteen battleground states in the 2004 presidential election, this year the AFL-CIO is targeting more than 200 races in twenty-one states, including many gubernatorial races. The new Change to Win Federation is focusing on only three states, but most of its affiliates are casting a much wider net. Individual unions in both federations report putting as much or more money and effort into a larger number of races than ever before. Even more than in 2004, member activists -- not union staff -- are contacting fellow unionists at work, in neighborhoods and by telephone.
FULL story at link above.
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