Labor and the Democrats

Unions back mostly Democrats, but some members lean Republican

By DON McINTOSH, Associate Editor

In a country where business money permeates every pore of the body politic, unions are about the only organized vehicle for working people to express their political will.

Every election season, union members study issues and candidates, make endorsements and contributions, and go door-to-door like no other force in America.

The stakes this year are high, and unions are raising and spending more money than ever on politics, and are working harder than ever to educate members. According to the Federal Election Commission, as of July 1, 2004, union political action committees (PACs) had raised $138 million to spend in the 2004 election cycle. That compares to $52.5 million for the entire 2000 cycle. On Sept. 2, an estimated 15,000 union members knocked on the doors of hundreds of thousands of union households to talk about the urgency of the coming election. It was the largest single-day election mobilization in U.S. labor movement history.

Overwhelmingly, union political support goes to Democrats, to the dismay of some union members who favor the Republican Party. In the 2000 election cycle, 94 percent of labor’s contributions went to Democrats. Yet a significant minority of union members vote Republican.

“We’ve got a lot more Republicans than we’ve ever had,” says Bob Petroff, directing business representative of Machinists District Lodge 24.

At one time, Petroff said, Machinist members, like most union members, were solidly Democratic.

Labor educator Rick Gregory remembers that era, and has seen the shift. “Unions in general still support Democrats, but if you look at the members, they’re increasingly supporting Republicans,” Gregory said.

A lifelong union man with a doctorate in history from Vanderbilt University, Gregory is education director at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1059 in Columbus, Ohio; he’s a frequent speaker at the annual stewards conference of Oregon-based UFCW Local 555 — for his ability to put union political involvement in a context that makes sense.

Gregory said that in the decades before the Great Depression, the labor movement steered clear of political commitments. “Samuel Gompers [founder of the American Federation of Labor] was very adamant about keeping the AFL out of politics.” Unions had members in either party, so politics was potentially divisive. Just as important, Gompers believed that unions’ role should be limited to winning concessions for members by bargaining with employers.

That attitude changed in the modern labor movement that came up out of the 1930s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt demonstrated to labor leaders that having a pro-labor party in power could transform life for working people much more rapidly than employer-by-employer bargaining. In less than 10 years, FDR and the Democratic majority in Congress established a legal minimum wage; created Social Security as a way to eliminate poverty among the old; put millions back to work in public works projects; and set up a legal structure that forced employers to deal with unions that had the support of a majority of workers.

The Republicans remained the party of big business, and after they swept to power in Congress in 1946 on a wave of anti-Communism, they passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which rolled back union legal gains over Democratic President Harry Truman’s veto.

That decade set a pattern that has yet to be broken — unions tend to support Democrats, and anti-union forces support the Republican Party.

So why are many members defying their unions’ recommendations and voting Republican?

Gregory says the answer lies in a Republican strategy to peel away layers of Democratic support — by taking socially conservative positions on divisive non-economic issues.

Beginning in the ’60s, Republicans nimbly courted support among those uncomfortable with that decade’s racial and social upheavals. And in the ’70s and ’80s, the party appealed to conservative Christians who opposed abortion and homosexuality. The Republican Party platform added planks opposing legal abortion. And this year, it added a plank in support of amending the U.S. Constitution to prevent states from sanctioning gay marriages.

None of these are typical “bread-and-butter” issues that unions would weigh in on, Gregory said, and yet they are issues that many union members care about.

“The conservative element in the Republican Party has been brilliant about getting American voters to focus not on pocketbook issues but on hot-button social issues,” Gregory said.

Ronald Reagan’s myths about “welfare queens driving Cadillacs” resonated with many Americans, including some union members, who voted for him even after he showed a hostility to the labor movement. It was Reagan, a former actors’ union president, whose replacement of striking air traffic controllers demonstrated to big business that labor’s right to strike could be made meaningless by the employers right to hire “permanent replacements.”

“Reagan was quite good at getting Democratic Party people to vote Republican over social issues rather than economic issues,” Gregory said.

But if the same party that opposes abortion and gay marriage also threatens the economic interests and workplace rights of working people, union members who are socially conservative may be forced to choose which matters more.

Conversations with a number of registered Republicans in Machinists Lodge 1005 and other unions suggest a diversity of viewpoints within the Republican party.

Frank Hole, a retired member of Machinists Lodge 1005, switched his registration to the Republican Party about a decade ago. An evangelical Christian who attends Good Shepherd Community Church in Boring, Ore., Hole said he joined the Republican Party because he’s opposed to abortion and homosexuality. But he disagrees with the “pro-big business” slant of the party. “They’re financially destroying this country, sending jobs overseas, and I hear nothing on this issue from Bush.” Hole said he’s very torn about how to vote in the presidential election.

Roy Christiansen, Lodge 1005 vice president, is also a registered Republican, though not a party loyalist. An avid hunter, he belongs to the National Rifle Association, and believes gun owners’ rights are safer under Republican leadership. Christiansen likes President Bush on a personal level, and believes his values are good. He’s also a member of the Beaverton Four Square Church, and like Hole, opposes abortion and gay marriage. But Christiansen, a Freightliner assembly worker, said he’s concerned about all the jobs leaving the country. “I believe corporate business dictates what [Bush] has to do.”

That thought was echoed by Freightliner worker Dominic Damiani, a former steward who says he used to be a “Reagan Democrat” and now is a “Kerry Republican.” Working people and the middle class were much better off under former President Bill Clinton, Damiani said. Despite being a registered Republican, Damiani believes his union’s support for Kerry is appropriate: Unions were formed to protect workers, he said, and right now workers need protection from a falling economy.

Union home care worker Lee Meyers said she opposes abortion and has been a registered Republican all her life. But her political views have shifted, she says, since she became a home care worker and got involved with the Service Employees campaign to unionize home care workers; she said she intends to vote for John Kerry — because the Republicans are too much in the pocket of big business.

While Republicans have been wooing union members on hot button social issues, Democrats have been angering union members by being unreliable allies on some pocketbook issues — above all, trade, in that a minority of Democrats have supported trade agreements opposed by labor.

Bruce Dennis, president of the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters, blames the influence of money.

“I’m one of those that believes both parties are bought and paid for,” Dennis says.

Political campaigns have changed in the last 40 years: As candidates increasingly rely on expensive polls and television ads, getting the money to pay for them has assumed primary importance.

Republicans, as the party of wealth, has the advantage. When Democrats tried to play catch-up in the money race, it fed the impression that neither party represents working people.

Lodge 1005 president Joe Estes, a registered Republican since Nixon was president, often votes Democratic, but is disgusted when some Democrats vote for trade agreements that help corporations send jobs overseas. That issue led him to vote for Ross Perot in 1992. With money calling the shots for both parties, he says, “there’s no party that represents the people of this country any more.”

He says he’ll probably vote for Kerry as “the lesser of two evils,” but wishes he had someone to vote for that he could get excited about.

“We really need someone like Roosevelt,” Estes said. “We haven’t had that class of person for a long time.”

Dennis from the Carpenters Union thinks labor’s number one priority should be campaign finance reform — getting money out of politics — and says he would be willing to give up unions’ right to give money to political campaigns if it meant corporations were kept out too.

That’s because for all the money labor raises and spends in politics, business spends more. In the 2000 election cycle, labor was outspent by business more than 13 to 1, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics. About 57 percent of that went to Republicans.

With big business as a political adversary, unions can’t afford for their own members to be split over social issues.

“Unions do their best work politically when people are paying attention to pocketbook issues,” said the UFCW’s Gregory.

“Workers are intelligent. They can look at issues and make their own decisions. I think unions have an obligation to educate their members about the issues.”

“The position unions should take is not ‘vote Democrat not Republican’ but look at candidates and their records.”

Most union leaders insist that sticking to union issues is what they do.

“We have a lot of Republican members,” says Cherry Harris, political coordinator for Gladstone, Ore.-based Operating Engineers Local 701. “Some of them are unhappy because they think we endorse only Democrats.” That’s not the case, Harris said. “We endorse people who are good for us.”

Local 701 endorses candidates that support workplace rights and investments in infrastructure, which is where the union’s members are employed.

“Gay rights, abortion, all those divisive issues are probably never going to affect your life as a working person, and yet what IS going to to affect your life is the working issues,” Harris said.

When it comes to labor’s “bread-and-butter” agenda, there are often consistent differences between Democrats and Republicans.

“If we look historically since the 1930s, there is no question which party has been better for union workers,” says Gregory.

Mary Botkin, one of several full-time political coordinators for Oregon AFSCME Council 75, said on very basic economic issues, like tax policy, privatization and outsourcing, Democrats tend to vote for policies that benefit working people. “I wish that the Republicans were as responsive to the needs of our members.”

“We rate candidates based on their records, not on their party affiliation, but the reality is the Republicans are not very responsive to us,” she said.

The AFL-CIO, responsible for coordinating union political efforts, tracks issues that are important to unions and publishes annual rankings of legislators. The rankings and voting records of the U.S. Congress are available online at www.aflcio.org, while the rankings and voting records of Oregon legislators are available at oraflcio.unions-america.com.

In the U.S. Senate for example, only one Democrat has less than a 65 percent lifetime rating, while only one Republican has better than 47 percent. Most Democratic Senators have ratings above 80 percent; most Republicans have ratings below 20.

Nowhere is the difference clearer than on bills that impact labor directly. In 2002, on a bill that would have added burdensome increases to the paperwork unions must file with the federal government, all 50 Democrats in the Senate voted against it, whereas 43 Republicans voted for it, and only four against it.

Democrats are also more likely to take seriously symbols that are important to labor. They tend to use union print shops in their campaign materials and display the union printing logo. They are more likely to attend union meetings when invited, and more likely to return the questionnaires of union political committees.

Botkin says this election may be the most important of her lifetime.

“It’s about putting Americans back to work. And corporate accountability. We have the power to make a change in November.”

Union dues and politics

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