For the past 20 years, Clint Handley has driven trucks for the City of Springfield’s
public works department. He used to be a Teamster but now he’s with the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). On Saturday, Jan.
10, Handley was downtown at the Springfield Hilton for AFSCME’s statewide conference.
Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard Dean also was there, taking a break
from stumping in Iowa to thank the union, which has 40,000 members in Illinois,
for its recent endorsement.
Despite his union’s pledge, Handley, one of the few people at the Hilton not wearing a green “AFSCME for Dean” T-shirt, says he probably won’t vote for the former Vermont governor in the March 16 Illinois primary. Instead, he’s leaning toward a long-shot candidate, Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich. Handley is, however, all business in the U.S. Senate race. His union recently endorsed State Sen. Barack Obama, D-Chicago. When AFSCME calls upon Handley to help out with Obama’s campaign — which it will — he says he’ll be there.
“I will go campaigning for Obama. I will walk door to door,” Handley says. “I’m not so sure about the presidential race, but I’m sure about Obama.”
Although booting George W. Bush from office is most of organized labor’s primary political objective this year, pollsters are predicting the president has a strong chance of winning this fall. So labor’s Plan B is making life difficult for Bush by wresting control of Congress from the Republican Party. Republicans currently own a two-seat majority in the U.S. Senate; electing a Democrat to succeed U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican who is not running for reelection, could help shift power in that body.
There are nine Democrats in the Senate primary. Whoever wins the nomination will owe a lot of thanks to the union vote, which still packs a powerful punch in the state.
More than one million Illinoisans are union members, according to the Illinois AFL-CIO, which includes all of Illinois’ approximately 1,500 union locals. When any union endorses a candidate, that candidate can expect a huge boost in volunteers, cash, and often fresh wind for ready sails.
“Unions are really very politically relevant,” says Bob Bruno, a labor and industrial relations professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
A strong union’s endorsement provides more than just people and money, he says. Perhaps as significant is the energy and buzz a union can bring to a campaign.
“They can hold rallies and bring in workers from other areas. They all have educational conferences and candidates are going to be invited to speak. Those who don’t show, do so at their peril,” he says. “Unions give a candidate a change to talk about the issues and pass out the literature.”
As Illinois labor’s umbrella organization, what more could a candidate want than the AFL-CIO’s nod? When Dan Hynes received just that last week he told reporters it was “the most significant endorsement in this campaign,” shadowing even Hynes’s earlier endorsement by Michael Madigan, the powerful Illinois House Speaker and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party.
The AFL-CIO is certainly one of the largest endorsement-making groups in the state, if not the largest. Its endorsement session last week apparently recorded an all-time-high number of delegate votes. Campaign watchers speculated whether AFL-CIO’s support for Hynes meant the primary race among Democrats was over before it began.
AFL-CIO backing shouldn’t be underestimated, of course. Hynes, who’s currently the state comptroller and a Chicago political favorite, received about 75 percent of the vote from AFL-CIO delegates — statewide candidates only need two-thirds to get the endorsement. But Obama, the first African American to head the Harvard Law Review, stole some of Hynes’s thunder. Obama not only received AFSCME’s endorsement, but that of the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The three organizations not only represent about 230,000 members, they are perhaps the most politically influential unions in Illinois facing issues at the forefront of state and national politics — education and government spending. While no one was looking, a third Democrat, Chicago attorney Gery Chico, managed to pick up a few notable union endorsements of his own, including seven United Steelworkers of America locals and the Hispanic-American Labor Council, an up-and-coming powerhouse.
UIC’s Bruno says the lack of a united labor front promises “an inspiring primary season.”
“It’s not that labor can’t get its act together,” he says. “It’s about the excitement around the democratic process. It’s a real positive example of how the labor movement is not so homogeneous in its political views.”
Not-so-homogenous, to a point: During the AFL-CIO’s endorsement process, only one Republican candidate, Jack Ryan, participated. And he didn’t even turn in his questionnaire, not that it mattered. The first candidate AFL-CIO delegates got to vote for or against was Hynes. When he got his 75 percent, it was over. There was no point voting for any one else.
Hynes spokeswoman Chris Mather says her candidate was the first to put out a job creation plan — a factor that influenced the labor federation’s endorsement. “An AFL-CIO endorsement doesn’t happen for a candidate without a vision and a record,” she says.
Not all union endorsements are equal, says Bruno. Organizational strength, for instance, makes up quite a bit for size, he says. The Illinois Federation of Teachers not only touts its 90,000-plus membership, but that 90 percent of its members are registered voters — among the highest percentage for Illinois unions, says IFT spokesperson Dave Comerford.
Unions also arrive at their endorsements differently. AFSCME bases its endorsements for statewide candidates on a membership-wide election. The AFL-CIO has an executive board made up of delegates representing various affiliated unions; votes are weighted based on the size of the delegate’s union or local. IFT also has an executive board that does the endorsing but the federation polls its members for guidance. This all affects how the rank-and-file rallies around its leadership. AFSCME leaders claim that they can expect a large percentage of their members to vote for the union’s endorsement partly because its democratic process seems more fair.
“I personally find AFSCME more progressive thinking, not necessarily in lockstep with who’s in control,” says Debbie Williams, a Springfield attorney for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and an AFSCME representative. Williams says she, like truck-driver Handley, expects to work weekends walking precincts and making campaign calls on Obama’s behalf.
But executive-board endorsements also resonate as long as the union keeps in touch with its members. “We’ve seen through the years and through polling members that they do take our endorsements strongly into consideration,” IFT’s Comerford says. “A big part of that is we don’t just tell them to vote for someone just because we say so. We explain why.”
Although organized labor represents a shrinking part of the private-sector workforce, a weak national economy means traditional bread-and-butter issues are likely to resonate with nonunion voters this year.
As Chris Mather, Hynes’s spokesperson, says, “More than three million jobs [nationwide] have been lost in three years — an almost unbelievable number.” She blames the Bush administration’s economic policies on rising health care costs and “an unprecedented assault” on worker’s rights.
Bruno says these issues, along with labor’s role as counter-measure to “right-wing politics,” have helped unions reclaim their status as progressives.
Not that mainstream America sees it this way. Bruno says there’s also a lot of concern among labor folks that their message is hard to get out because most of the media coverage of organized labor is negative. Campaign finance reform has also crimped labor’s style. Labor Web sites can’t even mention endorsements for federal races because doing so counts as a political donation.
Still, at least among Democratic Senate candidates, the labor vote remains a highly sought-after commodity. Earlier this week Democratic candidate and multimillionaire Blair Hull of Chicago announced his new campaign commercial, which focuses on job creation and tax reform.
Hull doesn’t have a single union endorsement. You might not think this matters to a guy who’s pledging to spend $40 million of his own money to get to Washington, D.C. But he still needs the votes, of course. Why else would he campaign with a huge blow-up copy of his old union card?
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2004.
