Those 200,000 Election Volunteers Lost
Unique Chance to Recruit New Members

AFL-CIO unions deserve to be congratulated for their extraordinary achievements in the 2004 presidential election. They sent close to 5,000 staff people to work full-time on the campaign. They mobilized 200,000 union volunteers to knock on the doors of six million voters to discuss issues that most concern working families.

They distributed more than 30 million flyers. They set up phone banks, open 24/7, where calls were made to hundreds of thousands of voters around the country, but especially in the battleground states. The labor movement, more unified than in decades, organized an enormous voter turnout in the final days of the campaign.

Because of organized labor’s tremendous effort, union households were able to account for about a quarter of the national vote, with the bulk of it — 65% — going to the Kerry-Edwards ticket.

Yet one wonders why AFL-CIO strategists didn’t see the election campaign as a way to recruit new members or at least build favorable sentiment for unions. With 200,000 union volunteers talking to millions of unorganized workers on job sites and in the communities, we had a made-to-order opening to get the union message to that vast audience in one-on-one discussions. Why did the AFL-CIO pass up this wonderful opportunity?

In training volunteers how to make house calls, they could have taught them how to bring the conversation around to the advantages of belonging to a union, without diminishing their pitch in behalf of Senator Kerry.

Certainly, the right to join a union is an important election issue, even though it was far down the list on Kerry’s agenda. And why weren’t the volunteers instructed to include a couple of union flyers along with the literature they left in support of the Kerry campaign?

Undoubtedly, many of the workers whom the volunteers contacted were among the 50 million who say they’d like to join a union. Wouldn’t it have been great if the volunteers had had them fill out information cards, so they could be contacted later by a union organizer? It’s hard to guess how many unorganized workers would have signed those cards, but the odds are it would have been plenty.

It’s unlikely there will be any serious analysis within the labor movement of the election defeat or why, for example, the Democratic Party treated the AFL-CIO like a distant relative, without giving the unions major credit for their exceptional contributions to the campaign.

A survey of union Web sites on Nov. 9, a week after the election, showed that the following internationals had nothing to say to their members about the elections: AFSCME, Auto Workers, Laborers, PACE, Teachers and UNITE HERE.

The Machinists issued a one-paragraph item, headed, “Union Members Showed Up in Force.” CWA boasted about the strong vote for Kerry Edwards by its members, without mentioning that the Democrats had lost the election.

President Sweeney tried to put the best face on the Kerry defeat with a pep talk to union members. “We will take the energy and momentum, the technology and the field operation we developed throughout the campaign and use it to turn our country around,” Sweeney said.

Jim Hoffa, president of the Teamsters, issued a fighting statement, which said, in part: “November 2 was not the end of our fight to take back this country for working families. It was the beginning. This effort was never about one candidate, one political party or a single election. It is about moving forward a pro-worker agenda at the national level. We will continue the fight for fair trade, universal health care, worker rights, pension reform and retirement security.”

The Service Employees were positively ecstatic, as though Kerry had won the election by a landslide. It issued a press release, headlined “Anatomy of an Election Strategy: The Facts on SEIU’s Role in Bringing Home a Victory For America’s Working Families.”

The three-page press release listed SEIU’s spectacular contributions to the election campaign by providing organizing talent, membership participation and the “investment” of $65 million, “the largest in the history of American politics.”

Union leaders should have learned that it takes more than the big numbers they posted in the 2000 and 2004 elections to win the White House and both Houses of Congress. They’ve got to be aggressive about the choice of candidates and issues and be brought into strategy discussions at the highest level. After all, where would the Democratic Party be without the support of organized labor?

Our weekly “LaborTalk” column is posted every Wednesday at our Web site: www.laboreducator.org.. Union members who want information about the AFL-CIO rank-and-file reform movement should visit www.rankandfileaflcio.org.