Unions on the march (GOTV)

[Omaha Steve]

X post in Labor & Socialist-progressive

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/11/politics-and-labour

Nov 3rd 2014, 13:27 BY R.W. | DEARBORN AND PHILADELPHIA



ON A recent Saturday morning, a couple of hundred union members—car workers, labourers, and teachers—gathered at a local hall in Dearborn, Michigan. Richard Trumka (pictured), the head of the national arm of the AFL-CIO (America’s largest trade-union group, with 12m members) had flown in to fire them up. He warned that the upcoming mid-term elections would be close. “Every additional vote you get out could be the difference between us winning and losing. And I gotta tell you, we are behind.”

Over the past few years union-curbing legislation has been introduced in a host of Republican-led states, mainly in the Midwest. Wisconsin, for example, passed a law that ended collective bargaining for public-sector workers. Indiana and Michigan became the 23rd and 24th states to pass “right-to-work” legislation, which prevents unions from forcing workers to be members, and keeps dues out of politics.

Unions, whose influence has been declining for years, see all this as an existential threat. The proportion of American workers who belong to unions has fallen from about one in three in the 1950s to only one in nine today. Unions think that electing Democrats might help slow or even reverse that slide. So they are eager to mobilise their troops.

Mr Trumka asked union officers to release more staff temporarily from their jobs so they could work on the campaign. “We need between now and election day, every single day, a minimum of 348 working shifts.” A shift is at least four hours of knocking on doors. Canvassing is only part of his plan. He asked that volunteers also send out at least two letters to fellow members (“two will work, three would be better”). Because of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, unions can now canvass non-members as well as members. This means they can knock on every door in a neighbourhood, tripling and quadrupling the number of voters they reach.

FULL story at link.