From the Editor

WorkingUSA—Summer 2000 3

WorkingUSA, vol. 4, no.1, Summer 2000, pp. 3–7.© 2000 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1089–7011 / 2000 $9.50 + 0.00.

From the Editor

WHILE the new leadership of the AFL-CIO has identi-fied organizing as its number-one priority, revamp-ing union political action is a close second. Two decades

of conservative, market-oriented policy priorities have left labor’straditional political strategies in tatters. The so-called ReaganDemocrats of the 1980s were all too often disenchanted unionmembers. Further, electing labor-endorsed candidates had hardlyproved a guarantor of pro-worker legislation. The official politi-cal debate has shifted away from labor’s values of solidarity, col-lective advancement, public wealth, and economic democracy tothe corporate values of insular individualism, hyperconsumerism,private gain, and private power. Most important, unions find thattheir own capacity for politically mobilizing their membershipfalls well short of the needs at hand.

Yet, as many of the articles in this issue illustrate, hopeful signscontinue to appear. Beginning with the national elections of 1996,the AFL-CIO has shifted its resources away from advertisementsasking people to vote for labor-endorsed candidates to grassrootsefforts at providing union members and their families basic in-formation about issues important to them and how candidatesstand on these matters. In the last three national elections, theportion of voters who are union members grew from 14 percentin 1994 to 22 percent in 1998. While, overall, white men vote moreRepublican than Democratic, union white men vote more Demo-cratic in exactly opposite proportion. Picking apart the famous“gender gap,” in which women voters lean more heavily towardthe Democrats, reveals that in fact it is women union members,not women generally, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

Labor’s challenge today lies not simply in finding more aggres-sive ways to engage in traditional union political work but in re-

From the Editor

WorkingUSA—Summer 2000 5

organizing the contingent workers in the “new economy.”Over the past decade, individual unions have flirted with vari-

ous efforts to establish new political parties. Much of what laborneeds to revitalize its politics could be met through the kind ofgenuine party structure the American system fails to provide.While acknowledging the obstacles facing third-party organiz-ing, David Reynolds examines how several fledgling groups havedeveloped effective strategies for organizing in the U.S. environ-ment, including the establishment of viable local projects linkedto union support.

All these examples represent the most advanced cases of unionsbroadening their political practices. In this election year, how-ever, most unions and central labor bodies that seek new meth-ods for political action will focus on revitalizing their ability tomobilize around traditional get-out-the-vote goals. Such a focus,while more narrow than broader social-movement politics, re-mains quite relevant. In no small part because of labor’s moreissue-oriented get-out-the-vote efforts, the Republican margin ofcongressional power has eroded in the last two elections. Thisyear, organized labor hopes to deliver a decisive blow by reestab-lishing a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, ifnot the Senate.

The last two contributions in this issue evaluate labor’s recentefforts to mobilize its membership to vote. Polling and focus-groupresearch conducted by the AFL-CIO has found that many unionmembers resent union efforts to push them to vote for particularcandidates. The research suggests that members would be far moreappreciative if their unions would provide information on issuesimportant to them and how the candidates stand. Stuart Eimerand Roland Zullo tested the effectiveness of issue mailings madeby the Wisconsin AFL-CIO in 1996. The authors found mixed re-sults suggesting that literature must be accompanied with grass-roots contact in which union activists talk one on one with other

From the Editor

WorkingUSA—Summer 2000 7

suggest that such an accomplishment might have limited results.Much has been written about the supposed political conserva-tism of the American working class. Yet a new book, Battling forAmerican Labor: Wobblies, Craft Workers, and the Making of the UnionMovement, challenges this perspective by examining the organiz-ing experiences of the IWW and the AFL during the early twenti-eth century. In his review of the book, Immanuel Ness highlightsthe author’s arguments that American workers have long showna strong class-conscious militancy, though traditionally, in con-sequence of the political environment, it has focused far more onthe workplace than on social-movement politics and the electoralarena.

—David ReynoldsGuest Editor