Labor's Iowa Implosion
by Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, January 21, 2004
NASHUA, N.H -- Four years ago, as Al Gore and Bill Bradley duked it out in the New Hampshire primary, I stumbled across an encounter between some of Gore's aging union retirees and some of Bradley's college students in a town square abutting a busy Nashua intersection. Two days ago, as Dick Gephardt's presidential campaign fell apart in the Iowa night, that four-year-old scene took on an added poignancy: In hindsight, it may have been one of the last times that America's industrial unions mounted a persuasive campaign.
Initially, Bradley's youngsters and Gore's oldsters simply held up signs for their respective candidates and exchanged a few friendly taunts.
In time, the taunts gave way to a discussion, and the two groups quickly discovered that they agreed with each other -- and disagreed with their respective candidates -- on the issue of free trade, which both saw as a policy that enriched Wall Street and clobbered Main Street.
What was striking, though, was that the union retirees assumed the role of teachers, and that Bradley's kids happily became their students. But then, these weren't just any retirees. Ranging in age from their sixties to their eighties, these were all veterans of the United Auto Workers -- that is, they were beneficiaries of the old UAW's political education programs.
Walter Reuther, the legendary president of the UAW in the quarter-century following World War II, had built a union that was the primary advocate for social democracy in the United States, and a membership education program that enabled activists to be more fluent in social policy than (not to damn with faint praise) your average member of Congress. Reuther had been dead 30 years when the impromptu tutorial broke out, but the aging auto workers still knew their stuff.
Among America's industrial unions, however, there arose generations that knew not Reuther, that hadn't undergone that kind of political education, that hadn't organized new workers in decades, that had never been a part of a growing movement. In the renaissance of political action that labor has undergone since John Sweeney became AFL-CIO president in 1995, the unions that rallied around Dick Gephardt were among the slower pupils. Some of the central labor councils in major cities tally the number of "shifts" that different unions work during political campaigns -- the number of afternoons or evenings that a particular local's members spend walking precincts or phoning voters -- and the unions that really deliver tend to be such service-sector unions as the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union or the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). These are unions with vibrant organizing programs, and with political programs that reach out to the rank and file.
The industrial unions, by contrast, face nearly impossible odds in any organizing battle and have largely given up trying. They have few organizers steeped in the arts of persuasion. For many of these unions -- and the Teamsters, an old-guard union that transcends sectors -- "political action still mainly means writing a check to a candidate," says one veteran labor operative, "not involving their members in bottom-up political campaigns." The current generation of staffers at these unions demonstrably had trouble persuading their own members to back their endorsee. Gephardt took 22 percent of the union household vote in the Iowa entrance polls. John Kerry took 29 percent.
Kerry, it should be noted, outpolled not just Gephardt among union voters. He also beat Howard Dean (and Gephardt) among college-educated union voters. The efforts of the SEIU and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which both backed Dean, to rally these voters on Dean's behalf proved just as wanting as those of the industrial unions for Gephardt. AFSCME and SEIU are on the short list of unions whose staffers, like the Reutherites of old, do know how to talk politics to real people, but this time their conversations yielded precious few votes.
If the unions' efforts were underwhelming, their candidates' efforts were even more so. Iowa voters see the candidates up close -- a level of scrutiny that neither Dean nor Gephardt was able to withstand. The lesson of the past half-decade is that the more adept union political programs can still move votes when they have an attractive candidate. When saddled with a Gray Davis or the Gephardt and Dean who assailed Iowan ears and sensibilities for the past month, there isn't a lot they can do.
Like Othello, those unions that endorsed Dean and Gephardt may have loved not wisely but too well. The irony is that the candidates who stole the show in Iowa, John Kerry and John Edwards, have surged in part by embracing, in the words of one union leader, "a populist-progressive message that labor's been promoting, and that few Democrats this side of Paul Wellstone were saying just a few years ago." On Monday night Kerry spoke of the "imbalance of power in the American workplace" and Edwards condemned the denigration of workers in George W. Bush's America. Labor's message still resonates, but its ability to pick a messenger clearly needs some work.
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