The Hidden Player in Clinton’s Win

I don’t want to reduce my work as a labor columnist, but the truth is that this year my editors could have easily used some of my 1988 columns about labor’s role in politics by simply substituting the names of the new candidates.

For instance, in 1988, I wrote that in the battle between George Bush and Michael Dukakis, “The word union was not used once in the recent presidential debate (and) it was almost never used in campaign speeches.

“Yet, although their strength is diminished . . . unions are still a powerful force that must be reckoned with in the nation’s political life.”

The same words accurately describe labor’s hardly visible but crucial role in the just concluded contest between Bush and Bill Clinton.

In both of those elections, and in many previous ones, no other single segment of the political spectrum, except the major political parties themselves, matched the strength of unions, weakened though they were during the anti-labor years of Presidents Reagan and Bush.

Labor’s strength among Democrats was greatest because unions were united, unlike liberals and minorities who also voted in huge majorities for the Democrats.

This year, Republicans had strong support from powerful corporations, as they usually do because of ideological affinity, yet, unlike labor’s, that support was not generally coordinated. Besides, many business leaders backed Clinton. And while the religious right was influential, it wasn’t united behind Bush.

Yet labor’s vital role was rarely visible to the general public, largely because the Democratic strategists--encouraged by many members of the media--decided unions are so unpopular that their real strength should be downplayed lest Clinton be attacked as a “liberal labor captive.”

The strategists of Dukakis and Clinton didn’t want the candidates to ignore labor. They did make a few speeches at union conventions and publicly welcomed labor’s endorsements.

But the strategists--especially Clinton’s--wanted to leave unions as an unidentified part of a huge, amorphous “middle class” that seemed to include everybody but millionaires and the poverty-stricken.

Union leaders were rarely seen on those pervasive talk shows, on public platforms with Clinton, or on his cross-country bus trips.

All union leaders backed Clinton, but most argued, as one did: “Why risk the possibility that a public display of our effort would hurt the man we so urgently want to help?”

In effect, they bought the unsubstantiated argument that unions are so disliked that politicians should publicly shun them as much as possible.

Some disagreed, like William R. Robertson, head of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation, who was “dismayed that the candidates’ campaigns didn’t more openly recognize labor’s part in the campaigns.”

Robertson contended that union leaders should have been more out front because “our members who worked so hard got little public credit for their effort. And, even worse, few of the non-union workers we want to attract realize how crucial and positive a role labor plays for them and their families in the nation’s political life.”

Clinton knows the debt that he owes to unions, yet they are not pressuring him--yet--to push legislation they urgently need to regain the clout they once had.

At an AFL-CIO executive council meeting in Washington last Thursday, the nation’s top union leaders drew up a legislative agenda for the President-elect, but it barely mentioned unions, except to back a law to prohibit firing strikers--which is now illegal--by euphemistically calling strikebreakers “permanent replacements.”

They did not call for labor law reform to make our current laws effective and to specifically encourage unionization, which was a stated goal of the laws enacted under President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s--and those reforms would not cost the government anything.

Instead, they agreed on proposals they and Clinton already support, such as the need for tax reform and improved health care and education--all very important but, with few exceptions, not directly connected with labor’s future.

Clinton won only 43% of all the votes, but he won about 60% of the votes of union members, 80% of the votes of both blacks and liberals and nearly 80% of the Jewish vote. Without that massive support, he would almost certainly have lost.

In other words, despite Clinton’s talk about restructuring the Democratic Party along more conservative lines, he was elected mostly because the traditional alliance of liberals, labor and minorities was once again the heart of the party.

And labor was crucial to that alliance. Each union had its own political operation, but they also coordinated their efforts through what AFL-CIO spokesman Rex Hardesty called a giant “computerized list of 13 million union members that is the nerve center of all of labor’s political work.”

Tens of thousands of union members actively campaigned for Clinton and other labor-endorsed candidates in every part of the country. They had massive registration drives, distributed millions of pieces of campaign literature, walked precincts in every state and operated thousands of phone banks.

Almost all of this was ignored by the media, thus helping the Clinton strategists hide labor’s important role in the election.

When Democratic candidates such as Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale lost, their support from labor did not drag them down to defeat. They did that themselves, or it was done to them, because they lacked personal appeal, because they ran poor campaigns or because they had opponents such as Reagan, whose personal popularity was enormous.

It’s time for unions to once again make themselves a highly visible political force and not meekly accept the almost hidden role given to them by political operatives. Only that way can they most effectively push the progressive agenda they advocate.