Californians for Justice, founded originally to fight Props 209/187, ran an excellent precinct walking/phone bank campaign that dealt with both issues as an attack on working people. A number of individual unions, especially those with large immigrant or Latino memberships and teachers' unions, also tended to take on both 226 and 227.
I am less clear what the individual labor councils were doing. I think that too may have varied depending on the composition of union households they targeted, location, and political character of their leadership. As for advertising and media buys, none of the stuff I saw that came out of the AFL-CIO or State Fed dealt with 227 at all.
It is pretty clear from the widely different outcomes that labor (speaking generally) either (A) did not put real effort into reaching their members on 227, or (B) if they did, they failed miserably to make the connection and break through the layers of prejudice, ignorance, misunderstanding, confusion, etc. to which most white voters succumbed.
69% of the electorate were white, 14% Black, 12% Latino, 3% Asian. 23% were union members; 12% had a union member in the household; 65% were in non-union households.
Prop 226 Prop 227
Yes No Yes No Union Members 33% 67% 51% 49% Union Member
in Household 41% 59% 57% 43% Non-Union
Household 55% 45% 65% 35%
LA County 47% 53% 57% 32% Bay Area 37% 63% 49% 51%
Breakout by income groups shows that those earning less than $40K annually were most likely to vote against 226 (ranging from 58-59%), but only those earning less than $20K voted by a slim majority (51%) against 227. Conversely, those earning $40K or more were about evenly split on 226 ($40-$60K voted 52% No, while $60-$75K split 50/50%; $75K and up voted 51% Yes). On 227, however, the only income group to vote in a majority against 227 earned $20K or less, while those earning $20K-$40K voted for 227 by 56% and the two highest income groups ($60-75K, $75+) voted for it 64-65%.
I think it can be misleading to make broad statements about unions in general or individuals who embrace some form of social movement unionism. I rather suspect that their was wide variance between unions, influenced by location, occupation, industry, membership demographics, and the political consciousness of individual leaders. Many individual union members who embrace social movement unionism are not necessarily in positions of influence to determine what strategy their union adopted. Many unions that depended on labor councils for coordinated phone banks may have had little control over the "scripts" given volunteers. Without having specific information about particular unions in particular communities and about their respective labor councils, any sweeping generalizations about what they did or did not do would very likely be wrong or at least misleading. Even different locals in the same national unions could have acted in widely differing ways.
But, and this I think is more to the point, there is a profound "disconnect" between unions as institutions and their members is such that, with the exception of a small cadre of union activists and officials. Most union members did not intuitively understand the dangers of either proposition, thus necessitating an emergency "fire brigade" approach that focused most heavily on 226 and succeeded in getting its message across. It is no accident that the focus was on the proposition that most directly impacted all unions as institutions and union leaders in their capacity as political brokers, while the proposition that directly affected only a minority of union members (those in education and those with significant numbers of Latino, Asian, and immigrant members) got only spotty attention. A proposition that impacts broad, immediate, institutional and personal self-interest motivates a lot more strongly than a proposition that compels a discussion of xenophobia, racism, ethnic stereotyping, educational principals and philosophy, bigotry and prejudices. This would the the case regardless, but add to that the fact of the overwhelmingly white male composition of the vast majority of union leaders at all levels of the labor movement and there is little mystery. This just demonstrates the work we have yet to do if we are to restore organized labor to a position of significant influence and power as a leading element of a larger working class movement for progressive social change.
In solidarity, Michael E.