I ran a campaign office in Michigan 12 for Kerry. I can't speak highly enough of the incredible work the unions did in that campaign.

Before the union took an active role in the political process (lobbying, endorsing, having a PAC), the membership was majority Republican.  This was in about 1998.  Then, upon working with the conservative legislature, the union found out (duh!) that the Republicans generally are no friend of labor.  

Now, in 2005, the 6,000 member strong organization (the largest in Arizona) is becoming a monolithic Democratic voting bloc and gets its members out for Dems.  The AZ Correctional Peace Officers Association (AZCPOA), which is under the AZCOPS umbrella was instrumental in getting Governor Janet Napolitano elected in 2002.   They are going to come out just as hard for her in 2006 and for the Dem US Senate candidate, Jim Pederson.

It does behoove Democrats to take care of labor.  With their corporate policies, the Republicans managed to turn 6,000 mostly Republican voters into Democrats.  Haha.

I myself have some experience working with union members -- and I've found that these guys are something rather rare these days: white, male, working-class, and Democratic.

It's a fact that white males in America mostly vote Republican. It's also a fact that white males in unions mostly vote Democratic. That shouldn't be lost on anybody in our party, but sadly, I think it is.

However, it's certainly not lost on Republicans, who have successfully chipped away at union membership for this very reason.

My final point: these guys are fighters. We want them on our side.

what it does much better, especially over a long period of time, is create liberals.  Chris Bowers has waxed poetic about this point again and again, but union familes are liberal families, by and large.  this fact is no coincidence or accident of our times: being in a union means that you are led to believe (correctly) that your interests are best pursued by sticking together with others in roughly the same economic position as you, and that wealthy interests will undermine your well-being unless you are constantly vigilant.  that makes union workers liberals, and it makes their families liberal, hopefully for generations to come.

one of my favorite articles along these lines was published about a year ago at In These Times: http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2034/.  in addition to extolling the significance of labor as a social movement, the piece points out other ways for us to build new social movements the create yet more liberals.

.. and it hardly needs to be said, but liberals are among the most reliable constituency of votes that Democrats can have.

It is getting more and more rare that the union members vote in one way -

There is a reason why both Unions and The Democratic party have been dying for years. And that is precisely this: both are formed to execute the will of the people. Without that, they are cut from the source and wither as the unions have - and as globalization continues to march on them, ... very well may in the future.

I say this not lightly. Alot of what the unions have done, are good for America. They courageously stood against the people who were trying to use Homeland Security as a means of cutting overtime pay. Think about this for a second: the democrats took a massive bloodletting because they stood with the unions, when in the 2002 midterms, the homeland security bill was going through the house - and the unions opposed it because it cut overtime pay for workers.

Now, Americans know that the people running the table on bills like that are corrupt.

But still, things have not changed. Union support means nothing. Endorsements in last years election did not amount to any movement in the polls. In fact, the most venerable of all endorsements - the AFSCME endorsement of Dean - became nothing short of an albatross upon the neck of the candidate. It was withdrawn and re-issued to Kerry. It neither helped Dean, nor Kerry. And phone bankers get hung up  upon.  

If you need a good example of a person or a family hurt by corporate greed logon to the Internet and you'll find twenty of them on the message boards and blogs and you'll be talking directly to them in 25 minutes after you zabasearch them. Go to the local labour union office and it will take two days.

And when you said "1 million dollars" I visualized you looking like Dr. Evil in "Austin Powers". Someone should whisper in your ear... uh.. 1 Million dollars is not a lot of money anymore.

By the way, did Emminent domain reverse because of the unions? Have they been able to do anyting with WalMart-izatoin of America? How well do the wal-mart employees get paid? I can tell you what the dead companies are that used to sell things near that wal-mart that walked into town selling chinese goods at 30% below American-union prices and I can even point to a walmart that landed right next to a textile mill and made it so that the mill could no longer sell its own products there, in North Carolina. And oh yea, by the way - I can also show you about 3000 union employees in that walmart right now buying chinese christmas gifts.

Someone I know (a distant friend of a friend) tried a few years ago to buy american for christmas. She ended up almost not being able to buy anything at all. Even the labels were sewn in, by the chinese.

-=-

Now, I have a solution to this problem but it involves a radical viewpoint, and the reader to think carefully. Its easy to dismiss my thought as simply that of a non-union person who thinks unions are dead.  I am not saying that they do not serve a noble purpose. Please listen, its only one sentence:

Stop the process that turns bills into 10,000 page monsters.

Its just that simple. Everything in DC  gets riders and admendments and gets rolled up into things that nobody can do anything with. Think of Homeland Security: nobody questions we need to respond to Al Qaeda - how is it that the bill has a provision to cut overtime pay? Hurricane Katrina Relief - surely that one is a no-brainer - but wait - it has a special amendment (barton, r, texas) to allow coal fired power plants in pennsylvania to dump more mercury in the water and air...

As such, the positions that organized groups of people could take on the bills are absurd. Do you oppose Hurricane Katrina relief? No? Well, do you oppose making global warming and greenhouse gases, and dumping mercury in the air? Yes? Ok, what's the union position on the Katrina Relief bill.

Forget about illegal immigration, the process that creates and guides legislation in America is the problem. We could have laws that could keep America competitive to  china, as well as keep China an ally. We could have laws that reflect the will of the people to cut pollution (80% want it). All it takes is the ability of the single person, not the union, or the committee - but the human citizen who now has the massive support and information processing power of the internet.

Do you seriously think bills could not be written so that people could read them? A hypertext document allows people to check the key provisions of a bill quickly and easily. Procedural stuff could be marked as such; the whole drama surrounding passage of a bill - the connections to other bills - can be viewed online.

Do you seriously think that, going the way things are going - it makes sense to keep paying union dues and hoping the unions can take a stance that means something?

Who has stood up against Katrina Relief?
Who stood up against homeland security?
Who needs to stand up now?

With things the way they are, corruption is the only thing that gets anything done. That is why the GOP is in power, they take the cash and pocket it and get a minor number of things done for the CEOs of the world... and the unions are left as bagholders. And so, too, America.

As for me, well I am sitting in a union office being paid full time by a coalition of unions to do online organizing and blogging.  It is my job to hang out here, at dailykos and others and post away.  Our goal is to connect the progressive netroots to the unions.  The unions have an amazing amount of resources and institutional knowledge that the fledgling netroots don't have yet.  You may be able to raise $100k in a couple days, but we get to send a lobbyist up to sit in on negotiations.

I am not from the rank and file, nor have I worked as an organizer, but in my professional life some of my greatest memories are working with the unions.  My heros in 2004 were the working men and women who gave up their lives for several months. They moved to swing states, lived out of hotels and knocked on doors for the SEIU.  Instead of cleaning office buildings, or changing bed pans, they were talking to voters about why they cared so much about who was president.  They were there rain or shine wearing their purple and pins.

The power of our union coalition here in California for the special election cannot be overlooked.  People put aside their egos (which in unions can be quite large) and focused on the real enemy, Schwarzenegger.  Now we still have a coalition intact to take him on during his re-election.  The leaders are still meeting, the head of the prisons union goes on tours of schools with the head of the teachers union.  And I am still here, connecting you to what they are doing.  So, let's keep these ties.  There is strength in solidarity.

1. reform labor law so that workers can organize without fear of management retaliation - unionization rates would rise quickly, and that means more Democratic voters (just like the 30s and 40s)

2. legalize the status of millions of undocumented workers (making friends of new Americans is how the Democrats became a majority part in the first half of the last century)

3. pass universal health care - the biggest social reform since social security and medical care - solving this problem will bind millions to the party every time they go to the doctor and don't pay through the nose.

I believe the Democrats should work for two major changes that will give unions more power in the USA.  

First Pass laws that make easy for Unions to form.  Today the deck is stack against the formation of unions in a nonunion work place.

Second Pass a law that makes it illegal to hire replacement workers for the first three months of a strike.  

By empowering unions, the service work force, the white-collar force, and blue-collar would have real power to raise their income and to obtain better benefits.  I do not believe any one type of job is the Holy Grail to High Paying Jobs.  The Union is the only counter balance that the employee has to the greed and the power of Corporations.  

1.  Labor Unions have been working with the Alliance for Justice against Bush's Supreme Court nominees.  It's an important growth in their political activism beyond traditional labor issues.

2.  Labor Unions have been extremely effective working with the Campaign for America's future on the ad hoc coalitions they've established on Social Security, the 2006 Budget, and a number of other issues.

3.  One of the biggest threats facing labor at the moment is the abuse of the bankruptcy system for union-busting.  The judge in the Delta bankruptcy recently said:

Her remarks came amid a testy exchange between the judge and Delta lawyer Jack Gallagher in which Beatty, who the pilots have in the past accused of siding against them, assailed some of the airline's main arguments.

I am very happy you posted on unions, because I believe, as you point out, that the progressive blogosphere has a very weak understanding of the importance of unions to progressive electoral politics.

I just wanted to emphasize one point, which is that unions (and other grassroots groups like ACORN) can get the crowd turnouts and GOTV programs they have because they never abandonded the heart and soul of retail politics: face-to-face contacts.

While blogs and internet organizing bring a whole new capacity to engage people in public policy and elections, what they can never do (and shouldn't in my opinion) is take the place of a face-to-face conversation between two people in someone's home.

Studies of turnout in low-turnout elections show that this kind of contact, done 2-3 times can boost turnout by up to nine percentage points!

Union GOTV programs are effective not just because of the phone banks, which are important, but because of the door-to-door work, done by their members and volunteers. And one of the reasons it is so effective is because the unions represent a "trusted messenger" and their targeted voters are more likely to trust what the union says than Joe Schmoe from the campaign or the party, even if they are saying the same thing.

And, as other posters point out, unions, by engaging their members in the nuts and bolts of politics create progressive voters out of conservative ones. Investing in public policies that enhance the ability of unions to organize new members means investing in the expansion of the progressive base, which means, ultimately, more progressive Democrats in Congress, in State Houses, and in City Councils.

These points cannot be overemphasized.