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Labor Hits the Road to Beat Bush

By Jeralyn, Section Elections
Posted on Wed Oct 13, 2004 at 01:32:27 PM EST
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A big round of applause for our nation's labor unions...they are making their own Vote for Change tour, only they are using electricians, rather than musicians. On a mass scale, union members are hitting the road to get out the vote and beat Bush.

Union leaders are running a massive on-the-ground effort to defeat President Bush in swing states — a push that could prove crucial as the race for the White House boils down to competing drives to turn out voters.

Longshore workers, who tangled with the Bush administration during the 2002 West Coast port lockout, are walking precincts in landlocked Las Vegas. Members of the United Auto Workers (news - web sites), whose organizing tactics are being challenged by Bush appointees on the National Labor Relations Board, are stirring up fellow union members in depressed Midwestern factory towns.

Janitors with the aggressive Service Employees International Union are riding buses from Los Angeles to Arizona and from New York to Florida, targeting Latino voters. Meanwhile, the political bellwether state of Ohio is teeming with union electricians, steelworkers, phone technicians and other volunteers from neighboring states.

These union members, and admittedly, there are union members and even unions that feel differently, really, really dislike Bush.

"George W. Bush has done everything he can to put us down and keep us on the bottom," said AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney, whose federation represents 63 national unions with 13 million members. Despite efforts by Sweeney and others to rebuild membership, labor's share of the workforce has declined steadily in recent years and is below 13%.

"It has just been horrible, and workers understand that," he said. "I don't even want to think about what another four years would be like."

Rather than just complaining, they are doing something about it. And they are organized.

The AFL-CIO has identified more than 60,000 union voters in the state, most in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. An additional 15,000 voters are members of union households. All are fair game for persuasion campaigns by union volunteers. It's O'Brien's goal to have each household contacted multiple times, in person and by phone.

After a day of door-knocking, volunteers return with bar-coded sheets that identify Kerry supporters and undecided voters. Over the next two and a half weeks, a list will be compiled and refined, so that on election day, volunteers at precincts throughout the state will know exactly which pro-Kerry union voters they want to cast a ballot.

This isn't the first time they've done it.

....The initiative builds on the same member-to-member outreach that boosted the union share of the total U.S. vote to 26% four years ago from 19% in 1996, according to union-sponsored exit polls. That shift helped the Democrats take some difficult states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan.

We should all be taking lessons from them.

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