AFL-CIO maps big 2002 election drive

>Archive - PWW Print Edition Archive - 2002 Editions - May 25, 2002


 

To hear a four-minute audio interview of PWW reporter Fred Gaboury about the AFL-CIO decision to increase funding of their election 2002 campaign, click here.

NEW YORK – AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told reporters that the May 22 decision of the federation’s General Board to increase financial support for the federation’s Labor 2002 election campaign is propelled by the issues facing working families. “Real life examples of the last year – the Enron scandal, the squandering of the federal budget on a tax cut for the rich, the President’s plan to privatize Social Security, his drive to expand trade negotiating authority and historic unemployment – are proof that working people need a strong voice in politics to shift the balance of power in Washington away from business and back to workers,” said Sweeney.

“We are the only national organization that can reach out into tens of thousands of workplaces and hundreds of communities – nobody else can run a national campaign of people-powered politics,” he added.

Steve Rosenthal, AFL-CIO Political Director, told the World the additional funds will make it possible for the AFL-CIO to conduct the “biggest and most effective off-year election effort ever. It provides money to help us educate our members and their families, it will help us in our effort to register them and get them to the polls on election day.” He said the fact that some six million votes “went uncounted” in the 2000 presidential race made getting out the vote in the African-American, Latino, Asian and Pacific communities a critical issue.

Rosenthal said most of the federation’s 2002 election activity will be focused on 20 governor’s races, some 25-30 races in the House of Representatives and several key Senate races, including those in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and South Dakota. “Our challenge is to elect worker-friendly majorities in both houses of Congress.”

In response to criticism that the federation puts all of its political eggs in the Democratic Party basket, Rosenthal said the AFL-CIO and its subordinate bodies were “aggressively looking for Republican candidates they could support, but they are hard to find.”

Rosenthal also said too many Democrats are not aggressive enough. “Bush used the word ‘jobs’ 14 times in his State of the Union address. Dick Gephardt [D-Mo.] said it once in the Democratic response, ‘That’s no answer,’” he said, adding, “Our job is to keep the candidates from clouding the issues. If the 2002 campaign is about the war, taxes and values, the Republicans win. If it’s about jobs, healthcare and retirement security, we win. We have to make sure that the candidates do not get away with blurring the issues.”

Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers, called the Labor 2002 funding increase “a guarantee that our issues will drive the political debate in this year’s elections.” He said Labor 2002 is also a “warm-up” for the 2004 election.

Bruce Raynor, president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), said the additional money will “pay for lots of shoe-leather for our volunteers. The more resources, the more political muscle – and that’s what electoral work is all about.”

Bill Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, said his organization will focus its efforts in the “dozen or so” states where the Black vote can make a difference. “We are coordinating our effort with other civil rights organizations,” he said, “through the National Coalition for Black Civic Participation,” headed by Richard Womack, director of the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department.

The resolution authorizing the increased per capita funding promised that in the 2002 elections, working families and their unions will advance an agenda for good jobs, strong families and corporate accountability and will “mobilize working men and women for that agenda through grassroots legislative and political action at every level of government.”

The resolution noted the successes of Election 2000, saying that nearly five million members of working families had been added to the voting rolls and that the share of the vote from union households increased from 19 to 26 percent between 1996 and 2000.

Rosenthal said the AFL-CIO’s 2000 grassroots mobilizing campaign enlisted 1,000 coordinators, recruited 100,000 volunteers, distributed 21 million leaflets at workplaces, made eight million phone calls and mailed 15 million messages to union members. “We plan to improve on that this year,” he said.

“We know it works because it helped turn a 56-44 Republican majority in the U.S. Senate into a 50-50 split that made it possible for Tom Daschle, with a 100 percent [pro-labor] voting record, to replace Trent Lott, with a zero percent record, as Senate majority leader.”

“Slowly but surely, election-by-election, we are profoundly changing the makeup of our government in ways that can change the lives of working families,” Sweeney told reporters.

Although the measure carried overwhelmingly, Teamster President James Hoffa and Tom Buffenbarger, Machinists Union president, voted “no.” However both were careful to tell reporters their unions would abide by the vote and pay the increase. “I am a loyal member of the AFL-CIO,” Hoffa said.

The author can be reached at fgab708@aol.com