(The following story by Tom Troy appeared on the Toledo Blade website on August 28.)
DENVER — When Richard Trumka, head of the national AFL-CIO labor federation, asked the roomful of Ohio delegates yesterday how many belonged to a union, there were too many hands to quickly count.
Unions have always been a major constituency in the Democratic Party, but unions claim to be especially mobilized this year.
The total delegation to the Democratic National Convention here in Denver is about 25 percent union-affiliated, said Bill Burga, retired chief of the Ohio AFL-CIO.
“The unions are 100 percent behind [Barack] Obama, because we need a change so bad,” Mr. Burga said. “John McCain is not a maverick. He has supported [President] George Bush’s policies all along.”
The AFL-CIO has committed to fielding 250,000 volunteers nationwide to help a Democrat get elected.
A key piece of legislation unions would like passed is the Employee Free Choice Act, which would do away with the secret ballots in which employees vote to accept union representation. Instead, if a majority of the eligible workers sign an authorization card, the employer must recognize the union.
Unions claim employers use the secret-ballot process to intimidate and mislead employees, and that 60 million Americans now would be union members if given the chance.
Opponents say the unions would intimidate workers, using pressure to get them to sign the authorization card. The Heritage Foundation think tank says the proposal would strip rights from workers.
The legislation also would require companies and newly certified unions to accept binding arbitration if they cannot reach an agreement after 90 days of negotiations, and it would increase penalties when employers commit unfair labor practices.
Mr. Obama is a co-sponsor of the bill. Mr. McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, opposes the measure.
Unions also want free international trade policies replaced with “fair” trade deals, and they accuse Mr. McCain of wanting to privatize Social Security and tax health-care benefits.
McCain spokesman Paul Lindsay said, “John McCain believes that every worker’s right to vote in a fair election process, using a secret ballot, must be protected.” He said workers would be “devastated” by Mr. Obama’s “plans to raise taxes on individuals and the small businesses that employ them.”
The chance that unions might be viewed by Republican, independent, and nonunion voters as an interest group pulling the strings in an Obama administration doesn’t bother Mr. Burga.
“We don’t control anything,” he said. “We educate our membership.”
Sally Powless, regional director of American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 8 based in Toledo, said unions nationwide have been losing membership.
“Our members are hurting. Our numbers are down. We’re organizing just to stay where we were,” she said. “We want everyone to be able to organize.”
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of workers belonging to a union rose in 2007 by 311,000 to 15.7 million, or 12.1 percent of all wage and salary workers, compared to 12 percent in 2006. In 1983, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent.
In an animated speech to the Ohio delegation yesterday, Mr. Trumka, who rose through the ranks of the United Mine Workers union, said Mr. Obama has workers’ interests at heart, while Mr. McCain does not.
“A worker who votes for John McCain is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders,” Mr. Trumka said.
He said Mr. Obama has a
98 percent pro-labor voting record, and said there has never been a Democratic presidential nominee “more sensitive to the priorities of working families and union members” than Mr. Obama.
Mr. Trumka put how he viewed the role of labor in the 2008 presidential election in stark terms.
“These men and women [from labor families] have never been more critical to confronting the deception, the fear-mongering, the lies, and the racism of the Republican hate machine than they are this year,” Mr. Trumka said.
Some in organized labor are still disgruntled over Hillary Clinton’s loss in the primaries to Mr. Obama. Many of the union members in the Ohio delegation got there because they supported Mrs. Clinton and she won the state’s March 4 primary.
Anna Burger, the chairman of Change to Win, made up of seven unions, said some Clinton supporters were having a hard time letting go and switching loyalties to Senator Obama. But, she said in an interview with Associated Press, “the vast majority of them have.”
“We have to leave here Friday ready for action,” said Ms. Burger, a convention speaker last night.