Only at TNR Online | Post date 11.12.03
Wednesday David Kusnet, 1:00 p.m.
Wednesday
David Kusnet 11.12.03, 1:00 p.m.
Jim,
A transformed labor movement is transforming the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. The endorsement of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean by the two largest unions in the AFL-CIO--the 1.6 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the 1.5 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)-- speaks volumes about how organized labor has changed.
Little more than 30 years ago, labor's public face was the gruff, cigar- smoking, former plumber George Meany, construction workers clashed with antiwar protestors on the streets of Lower Manhattan, and reporters searching for the "typical" wage-earner interviewed assembly-line workers in the Midwest. These days, some of those antiwar protestors have become national union presidents, construction workers are as likely to be immigrant Hispanics as conservative "hardhats," and workers without four- year college degrees are more likely to work for low wages at Wal-Mart than for union wages and health benefits at General Motors.
As this year began, former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt was expected to win the support of most manufacturing and building trades unions. But the apparent front-runner for the nomination, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, was expected to enjoy the edge with the fast-growing government workers, service sector, and teachers' unions, who traditionally want to go with the likely winner. Back then, Dean was seen as a marginal candidate from a small and atypical state who appealed to the over-educated and not the underpaid.
Since then, Gephardt has conducted a competent but not flashy campaign, and he has been backed by 21 unions with more than 5 million members, including the Teamsters, Steel Workers, and Food and Commercial Workers. Kerry's campaign is collapsing, and retired General Wesley Clark is failing to do better with the same case that Kerry was expected to make--that it takes a combat veteran and national security expert to challenge George W. Bush. So today, AFSCME and SEIU are endorsing Dean, whose success at raising money and mobilizing grassroots support showed he could win even without major union endorsements and will likely be unbeatable for the nomination with them. Meanwhile, many state affiliates of the National Education Association, which isn't part of the AFL-CIO, can be expected to join in supporting Dean, and so may many some of the remaining AFL-CIO unions that haven't yet backed Gephardt.
All this isn't as surprising to students of the labor movement as it is to the political establishment. For public sector unions, particularly AFSCME, winning elections is as important as the capacity to conduct a successful strike is to the Teamsters or Auto Workers. As Victor Gotbaum, who led AFSCME in New York City from the mid-1960's through the mid-1980s, famously said: "We have in a sense the ability to elect our own boss." Over the years, AFSCME has often broken with private-sector unions to become the first major union to support likely winners, among them the liberal Republican John Lindsay for mayor of New York City and southern moderates Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for president. Widely regarded as one of the leading strategists in the Democratic Party, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee chairs the AFL-CIO's political committee and helped deny Gephardt the federation's endorsement.
For its part, SEIU--which includes public employees as well as health care and building service workers in the private sector--has occasionally endorsed mavericks such as Dean. In 1976, SEIU first supported the populist Fred Harris for president and later encouraged California Governor Jerry Brown. In 1992, the giant New York City health care union, Local 1199 supported Brown against Clinton. 1199 has since joined SEIU and its president, Dennis Rivera, was one of the first unionists to support Dean.
Dean won SEIU by wowing union activists at meetings like the conference of member political organizers in September. Dean's anger at Bush and the Iraq war resonated with low-wage workers and highly educated professionals who are angry at the political establishment and much else in their lives, from health care conglomerates that balk at insuring their own employees to insurance companies that overrule the professional judgment of doctors and nurses. "I'm for Roosevelt because he knows my boss is a son of a bitch," a textile worker once said of FDR. Dean may yet mature into another patrician who can relate to people less privileged than he is.
Meanwhile, the Dean endorsements reflect a changing labor movement. Almost half of all union members are white-collar workers, and education (with 35 percent of its employees unionized) and government (with 32 percent) are more heavily unionized than durable goods manufacturing (16 percent) and construction (20 percent). Dean's rhetoric--"You have the power to change your own life"--sounds like a new generation of union organizers. Unions should this appeal to reorganize older industries and organize new ones, from health care to high-tech; a predominantly public-sector labor movement is unsustainable. Gephardt's emphasis on government and benevolent corporations protecting people against adversity harkens back to the social contract that corporate America and a new generation of confrontational conservatives like Bush have defaulted on.
Gephardt may not be a working-class hero, but he is a class act--a disciplined politician who has devoted the last 15 years of his career to representing working Americans whom the political, media, and economic elites have mostly injured or ignored. Ultimately, it will be good for labor, good for the Democrats, and good for the eventual nominee that so many private-sector unions are actively supporting Gephardt. Some, including the Teamsters and some maritime and building trades unions, don't always support the Democrats. Almost all can communicate with the real swing voters in this election--not the crude stereotype of poor Southern whites with Confederate flag decals but working-class whites throughout the nation. The arguments these unions are making now in support of Gephardt-- that Bush is abandoning the workers and industries that make America strong- -could eventually elect Dean. If Dean is as smart as he seems to be, he'll recognize that his adversaries in Iowa in January could be his most effective allies all across America next November.
David
David Kusnet was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992 through 1994. He was a staffer for AFSCME from 1974 through 1984 and is the author of Speaking American: How the Democrats Can Win in the Nineties. Jim Grossfeld is a consultant based in Bethesda, Md. A former communications director for the United Mine Workers, he was chief speechwriter for Clinton HHS Secretary Donna Shalala and House Democratic Whip David Bonior.
-- Michael Pugliese