Organizing Bill Key
A Labor Strategy For '08 Elections

By RICHARD STEIER

Next year's national elections will see New York's labor movement trying to re-elect first-term members of Congress who may be vulnerable to Republican challengers and making support of a bill easing the organizing process a key issue, union panelists said June 22.

ED OTT: No rush on endorsements.

The panel discussion of "The 2008 Elections: Communicating Labor's Agenda," included AFL-CIO New York City Central Labor Council Executive Director Ed Ott and Dan Cantor, who holds the same job with the Working Families Party.

Free-Choice Act Key

"The only issue labor will have will be the free-choice act," Mr. Cantor told an audience of union-newspaper journalists at the convention of the Metro New York Labor Communications Council.

The Employee Free-Choice Act's principal component is that it would allow unions to be formed if a majority of the workers in a bargaining unit signed a petition. Labor leaders say the current system of holding elections on union representation is too prone to management tampering through harassment or more subtle forms of persuading employees not to form a union.

DAN CANTOR: 'A Democratic-leaning era.'

A vote in the U.S. Senate on the measure is expected to occur shortly, but Vice President Cheney has already declared that President Bush will veto the bill if it reaches his desk, and labor leaders do not believe there is enough support in Congress to provide an override. They are hoping that next year might improve their chances among Members of Congress who would be reluctant to be tagged as anti-labor during their re-election campaigns.

'Pull Dems to Left'

"We are entering a Democratic-leaning era," Mr. Cantor said. "This is the fight that labor wants - a fight to pull Democrats a little more to the left."

Ten percent of the total number of Democrats in the House of Representatives comes from New York State, Mr. Cantor told the gathering at Musicians Local 802 in midtown. Labor will strive to "make our delegation more progressive, because it is not terribly so at the moment."

One way to do that, he said, was to threaten to support challengers to incumbents in Democratic primaries "to scare people" who aren't sufficiently pro-labor. "The one thing elected officials want above all else," Mr. Cantor said, "is to remain elected officials."

JOSEPH L. BRUNO: Tough call for unions.

He said labor would also make a "top target" of the Congressional seat now held by Republican Vito Fossella covering Staten Island and a slice of western Brooklyn to try to strengthen its hand.

At the same time, Mr. Ott said, unions will be focused on re-electing a couple of Democrats north of the city who captured their seats last November but could face tough, well-funded challenges by Republicans next year.

The strategy of New York unions for the election for President will depend heavily on whether former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is the Republican nominee, Mr. Ott said, indicating that this would force labor to concentrate its resources on ensuring that the Democratic nominee could win the state.

If a Republican from outside New York got the GOP nod, he implied, that would make it virtually certain that the Democratic nominee would prevail here, freeing labor to send its troops to other states where the outcome would be more in doubt.

"We expect to be sending buses of members to eastern Pennsylvania," said Mr. Ott, noting that a sizable contingent of union members who work in New York live in that part of that traditional "swing" state.

Wait on Endorsements

Mr. Ott said that his advice to labor leaders who are pondering an endorsement would be to let the campaign - which began unusually early in part because of the shift of many key primaries that in the past were not held until the spring to Feb. 5 next year - ''roll forward for awhile before taking any viewpoint."

Mentioning two Democrats who are heavily courting labor support, Mr. Ott noted that Sen. Hillary Clinton continues to draw fierce objections from leaders of the anti-war movement and that there are questions about the credentials of 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards beyond the fact that "he gives a very nice speech."

Mr. Ott's cautionary note about Ms. Clinton's electability seemed significant because the State AFL-CIO has already indicated a strong preference for her.

Another panelist, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, said labor should make clear to Democratic presidential contenders that there were economic needs that were sufficiently pressing that they took precedence over eliminating the massive budget deficit run up by the Bush Administration.

'Fiscal Handcuffs'

"The Democrats have put themselves in fiscal handcuffs because they talk about balancing the budget at all costs," she said.

In contrast to the national elections, where there is a general consensus among labor leaders that putting a Democrat in the White House and expanding that party's majorities in both houses of Congress should be union priorities, Mr. Ott said there were mixed feelings at the state level.

Republicans hold a slim and diminishing majority in the State Senate, and Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno has been sufficiently amenable to employee concerns to have gotten significant support from some of the largest and most powerful unions, including such traditionally Democratic bulwarks as the United Federation of Teachers and Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union.

Where normally labor benefits from having Democrats in power, Mr. Ott said, there was some concern that unlike Mr. Bruno - who has not hesitated to take on Governor Spitzer - the current Senate Minority Leader, Malcolm Smith of Queens, might be more deferential if the Governor opposed union legislation.

'Referendum on Spitzer'

The extent to which union leaders push for a Democratic majority in the State Senate, Mr. Ott predicted, is "going to be almost a referendum as to what they think of the Governor and the Senate Minority Leader ... whether he'll be a rubber stamp."

All the panelists expressed concern about labor's ability to make headway in convincing the next President and Congress to reverse the trend of accommodating corporations that ship their work to other countries where labor costs are far cheaper and unions are scarce.

Sean Sweeney, the director of Cornell University's Global Labor Institute, pointed out that international trade now accounts for 38 percent of the United States's gross domestic product, and said the trend would not be reversed even if a Democrat was elected President.

"To think that we can just pass a few laws and go back to some kind of New Deal paradise is just wrong," he said.

'We're Losing the Battle'

Mr. Cantor noted, "The world labor force has essentially doubled in the last 10 or 15 years with the emergence of China and India" as nations which have work forces that are huge and work cheaply for international corporations. "I think trade is one of the crucial fault lines in the Democratic Party ... and we're losing" the argument.

At the same time, he added, union membership has declined so severely in areas outside the northeastern part of the country that "we're not a national labor movement; we're a regional movement."

Mr. Ott said that unions have had trouble producing alternative ideas that appeal to American leaders, in part because they have seen their traditional role as being "paid by their members to preserve what they have." Labor leaders never anticipated, he contended, that corporations would find "a whole new way of reorganizing the world" after the Berlin Wall fell nearly two decades ago and Communism lost its viability as a system of government.

'Bad News' Tag Sticks

No effective labor arguments have been marshaled, Mr. Sweeney said, to counter what he described as the basic message of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that "unions are bad news" for developing economies.

Labor must do a better job of articulating the idea that "there are real possibilities to change the way the world economy is organized" that will benefit both workers and management, Mr. Sweeney said.