In My Opinion: Where Labor is Strong, We Can Make the Difference

Many people predicted that this presidential election would be the closest in 40 years. Actually it was the closest in 124 years — and it still hadn’t been decided at CWA News press time, a full week after the election.

This is the most dramatic example we’ve ever seen of the oft-repeated phrase, every vote counts. As I write this, the challenge now in Florida is to see that every vote is indeed counted. The many reported voting irregularities in Florida must be thoroughly examined before the American people will be satisfied with the final result, no matter what it is.

However this incredible balloting imbroglio is untangled, one thing that is clear about the 2000 election at every level is that CWA and the rest of the labor movement turned in an extraordinary effort.

Union families accounted for a record 26 percent of the total vote, up from 23 percent the last two elections. With union members favoring Al Gore over George Bush by a 2-to-1 margin, the math worked out this way: one out of every 3 votes for Gore came from a union household.

The result, it appears, gave Gore a popular vote victory that defied the predictions of virtually every pollster this year. It was clearly the union turnout that delivered critical battleground-state victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Washington for Gore. And perhaps Florida, too, when the dust settles.

Additionally, labor made substantial gains in electing pro-worker candidates in the Senate, picking up Democratic seats in Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri, and retaining the key seat in New York where Hillary Clinton replaced retiring Daniel Moynihan.

The Senate race in Washington state was another cliffhanger at press time, with the possibility that Democratic challenger Maria Cantwell might unseat Slade Gorton. If that were to happen, the Senate could see a 50-50 split between the parties for the first time in over a century. (The status of Senator Joe Lieberman’s seat in Connecticut also remained in doubt pending the presidential tally.)

In other key elections, union members played a major role in winning a Democratic state senate in Colorado, gaining a few pro-worker House seats and beating back anti-worker initiatives in Oregon as well as school voucher measures in California and Michigan.

The labor movement demonstrated that in the states where we are strong, we can define the political landscape and elect pro-worker candidates. Major pro-worker Senate losses this year occurred only in the “right to work” states of Nevada and Virginia. Our challenge in those areas lies in organizing and building our grassroots strength.

This year’s Labor 2000 effort by the AFL-CIO and affiliate unions including CWA was the biggest union political mobilization ever. We fielded more than 100,000 activists in a huge rank-and-file drive that registered some 2.3 million new voters in union households and involved millions of personal phone calls and individual contacts to get out the vote.

This program energized us and provided a model for the future. There is much we can take heart in despite the disappointment of seeing the Congress still — barely — controlled by the anti-worker GOP leadership of Representative Tom DeLay and Senator Trent Lott.

Congressional gains, especially in the Senate, helped build a progressive buffer against attempts by corporate and radical right forces to attack workers’ rights by dismantling the Fair Labor Standards Act or passing a TEAM Act or National Right to Work bill, even if the Republicans take over the White House.

However, since the Republicans still control the committees as well as the legislative agenda in both houses, we will remain on the defensive in the legislative arena for the next two years, and we must bolster our lobbying efforts.

If Bush were to prevail in this election, he could be the first man to become president while actually losing the popular vote since Benjamin Harrison. With a close party split in Congress, he may be handicapped from delivering such sweeping initiatives as privatizing Social Security.

However, a Bush presidency would have a negative impact on CWA members in many ways. We could look for OSHA to be severely weakened. We would see pro-corporate, anti-worker appointments to the NLRB and other agencies as well as to the federal courts and Supreme Court.

We would certainly see attempts by Bush to push privatization of state social services, threatening thousands of public worker jobs, because he already tried to do that in Texas and was blocked only by the denial of a federal waiver by the Clinton administration.

Whatever, the final outcome, we face major challenges. And we know what to do about it — organize to broaden our grassroots strength, bolster our legislative action efforts, and continue building on the great political mobilization model of 2000 as we look toward 2002.

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