GOP’s Fight With Union Politics

Union strength in the workplace has dwindled, but, not satisfied with that, many Republicans are now pressing for legislation to weaken labor’s still impressive strength in the political arena.

The goal is to blunt the increasingly sharp political tools that unions use to get their nearly 20 million members to vote for labor-endorsed candidates, most of whom are Democrats.

The Republican battle plan is primarily designed to block the methods unions utilize to register members, get them to the polls on time and explain why their leaders think they should vote for labor-endorsed candidates.

Unions have long used phone banks, door-to-door visits, mass mailings and computers to ask their members to support labor’s endorsed candidates. Now they have refined and increased the use of those techniques, employing computers and sophisticated telemarketing methods.

Congressional Republicans have introduced bills to stop the use of union dues to finance these labor tactics, which depend on costly communications between union leaders and their members in political campaigns. That restriction of freedom for unions will be tricky for Republicans to impose because it would also mean restricting support they get themselves from business and other political action committees. That was one reason why campaign-financing legislation wasn’t adopted by the just-concluded session of Congress. But determined Republicans such as Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) say they are going to push ahead “to protect the rights of the working man” by limiting the use of union money in politics.

Most Democrats oppose the bills, and the Democrats control both the House and Senate. However, if the Republicans accept limitations on the support they get from their own allies, they might get the limitations they want on the political freedoms of unions too, all in the name of campaign reform.

The GOP would get the best of the bargain since unions are still the single most effective political institution in the country, because their influence is felt in almost every race from presidential contests to small town elections.

A majority of union members--between 60% and 65%--usually votes Democratic and that makes them a decisive force, especially in close elections.

Unions have been the decisive force in nominating the Democratic presidential candidates through primary elections. The defeats by Republican rivals in general elections in recent years don’t diminish the importance of the role unions play in choosing the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

True, the continuing influence of unions in politics contrasts sharply with their declining strength in the workplace: While the total number of union members has remained steady in recent years, unions now represent only about 17% of the work force, compared to more than 40% a few years ago.

But even so, unions’ political strength remains greater than that of any other group.

Liberals, labor and minorities who once formed a solid core of support for the Democrats are still predominantly Democratic voters. In fact, a larger percentage of Jews (74%) and blacks (78%) voted for Democratic candidates in races for the House on Nov. 6 than union members (65%) did.

But only labor unions have a national organization to help coordinate their political activities among their widely disparate members whose only common bond is their union. About 30% of union members are Republicans.

Business puts up more money for Republicans than labor does for Democrats, but, like Jews, blacks and other identifiable blocs of voters, business doesn’t have something like the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) to unify their political activities nationwide.

Another union strength is the proportion of them who actually vote. Nearly half of all union members voted in the last election, in contrast to about 36% of the electorate as a whole, and one key reason for that turnout is labor’s registration and get-out-the-vote campaign that the Republicans are so anxious to stop.

In the closely watched governor’s race in California, the loser, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, got 60% of the labor vote statewide and 65% in this area, where the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor put on a particularly strong campaign for her. The Republican effort to weaken labor’s political influence is aimed at just such tactics used by labor here.

For instance, William R. Robertson, head of the county labor federation, said the federation assembled 75 members who made more than 24,000 phone calls beginning a month before the election asking members whether they were for Feinstein, Republican Pete Wilson or undecided. They were also asked which issues were most important to them in the governor’s race.

Then the name of each undecided member and the issue of most concern to him or her were sent by computer modem to the AFL-CIO COPE in Washington. A “persuasion” letter signed by Robertson was sent to each of the undecided members explaining the position of Feinstein and labor on that issue. The members were called again to see if they had decided to back Feinstein, and finally, all the Feinstein supporters received a postcard from the federation reminding them to vote, and they got another “don’t-forget-to-vote” phone call on Election Day.

You don’t need to be a political consultant to understand why most Republican politicians want to deny unions the right to use union money to try and persuade their members to vote for labor-backed candidates: It would be a quick, if unsavory, way to cripple some of the GOP’s most effective opponents.