In My Opinion: Gore is the Workers' Champion - It's a Matter of Record

Since the time of CWA’s endorsement of Vice President Al Gore for the presidency at our 61st Convention last July, Gore and Senator Bill Bradley have campaigned vigorously in Iowa, New Hampshire and other primary states and have engaged in many televised debates.
The news media have painted a picture of two Democratic candidates with little difference in ideology or on policy matters. One might fairly ask, wouldn’t either candidate be good for working families?

Our endorsement and continued strong support of the vice president are based on the conviction that he is unique among all the candidates of both parties in the strength of his commitment to working people, as well as his overall qualifications for the top office.

Al Gore was there for us long before he entertained running for the White House, and he stood up for CWA members at times when then-Senator Bradley from New Jersey did not. It’s a matter of record.

Let’s look at two key votes before Congress that dealt with the fundamental issues of protecting pensions and jobs for CWA members.

First, when the AT&T Bell System was broken up in the early 1980s, CWA mounted a legislative effort to give the workers pension portability as they were suddenly scattered among eight different corporate entities and were frequently transferred back and forth during a period of personnel adjustment. Without congressional action, these workers had no guarantee of keeping their seniority when they transferred.

As a congressman from Tennessee, Al Gore voted for the CWA-backed amendment to protect Bell workers’ seniority and pensions in 1983. When the Senate took up a similar measure in January 1984, Senator Bradley sided with the telephone companies and the Reagan administration, and against CWA, voting “no.” His vote helped kill the measure by 44-40. (Later the portability amendment would be passed in another legislative fight.)

In 1991, another key issue emerged that directly affected jobs for CWA members at the Bell companies. With a bill pending to permit the Bell regionals to manufacture telephone equipment, CWA was pushing for an amendment — opposed by the Bush administration — that required the Bells to perform that manufacturing in the United States.

Al Gore, by then a senator, voted for the CWA domestic content legislation on the key vote, while Bill Bradley was one of only two Democrats to cross over and support a measure by Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas) to kill the CWA amendment — despite the fact that AT&T had shut down a major manufacturing facility in his home state of New Jersey.

From the vice president’s standpoint, these are not isolated cases of support for working families. During Al Gore’s years in the Senate — representing a “right-to-work” state, I would stress — his record of support for AFL-CIO-backed legislation is topped only by that of Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)

These were among the factors that the AFL-CIO executive council took into consideration in discussing whom to endorse at the time that both Bradley and Gore were seeking labor’s support.

Time and again, Vice President Gore has shown that his commitment to workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively is more than talk or political expediency.

NABET-CWA members at ABC well remember election night in 1998 when the network locked them out — and when Al Gore stood up for them. The vice president was slated for a high-profile network interview with ABC White House correspondent Ann Compton, which would frame the election coverage for the Democrats. Gore canceled the interview, declaring: “I don’t cross CWA picket lines, electronic or physical.” His example caused other Democratic politicians to refuse to appear on ABC throughout the long lockout.

Gore walks the walk, demonstrating he means it when says, as he did last Labor Day speaking to the 25th anniversary convention of the Coalition of Labor Union Women: “Let me tell you as plainly as I can, I am pro-union, pro-worker, pro-family, pro-working family.”

And he spelled out a campaign agenda to back it up: Support for initiatives to make it easier for all workers to organize, further attention to equal pay for equal work, improved day care and after school programs for working parents, and expanding family and medical leave benefits.

These are the facts behind our union’s endorsement of Vice President Gore. This endorsement was reached following the democratic processes that are the basis of all our actions in CWA. A scientific survey of our members conducted for CWA showed overwhelming support for Vice President Gore, then delegates to our convention last summer made it official with their endorsement of Gore’s candidacy for the presidency. CWA does not presume to try to “tell” members how to vote. However, we do urge members to look closely at all the candidates and compare their records — and above all, register, go to the polls and participate in this great democratic process.

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