If Al Gore becomes the next US president, the moment when it became possible will be traced back to the biennial convention of the AFL-CIO, America's main trade union body, in Los Angeles in mid-October last year. AFL-CIO head John Sweeney took the risk of pushing through an early endorsement for Al Gore, then facing a strong challenge from Bill Bradley. Gore's floundering campaign was jump-started by the endorsement.
On the face of it this is curious-a presidential candidate in a nation where union penetration is below 15 per cent and whose CEOs invented union bashing and the flexible workplace, was launched by a union endorsement.
The choice of LA for the convention and the endorsement was less puzzling. It is that rare thing-a union success story. Today, LA is surpassing all other US cities for union growth; more than 86,000 workers joined unions in 1999, mostly from the immigrant workforce.
While LA is famous for its movie stars, the city's poverty rate is 18.5 per cent, five points higher than the national average. The new head of the city's Central Labour Council is Latino-and young-along with many Los Angeles union leaders.
The new AFL-CIO has wrapped itself in savvy advertising phrases like "Good Jobs-Strong Communities-A Voice for Working Families," (the theme of the convention), but the LA labour leaders are known for their creatively confrontational tactics, having led fasts and sit-ins at such bastions of wealth as Century City and the University of Southern California to win contracts for janitors and food service workers.
Increasing the minimum wage, a standard election year battle between Democrats and Republicans, has already re-surfaced in the election season. LA is one reason why. Amid the great wealth in the entertainment and high-tech businesses lie the ruins of a once booming aerospace industry, the fastest growing garment centre in the US (built almost entirely on sweatshop labour), and the rise of a service economy filled with minimum wage immigrant workers. In LA working adults who earn the minimum wage ($5.75 an hour in California), have no access to health coverage (another election year issue).
Twenty years ago, immigrants were competition in the workforce; today, those immigrants are the workforce. And these new workers caused the AFL-CIO in LA to revise a long-standing policy of sanctions against employers who hire "undocumented" workers, along with an amnesty for the workers.
Moreover, suddenly unions are "hip" again, as Newsweek has reported. Kids with purple hair and nose rings are lining up to become union organisers. After Gore's conference speech in October an African-American choir of North Carolina garment workers sang and trendy looking young organisers swayed in the aisles with beefier blue-collar workers.
John Sweeney would have enjoyed the picture. Since he took over the AFL-CIO presidency in 1995 the once ossified federation has been changing its image and rebuilding its political power. He saw a Gore endorsement as pay-back to a loyal White House friend. And when the carpenters, nurses' aides, teachers, and truck drivers piled in, several thousand strong, to the LA Convention Centre last year (next door to the complex that will host this summer's Democratic Convention), it was a foregone conclusion that Gore would get the vote.
Before addressing the convention, Gore met privately with newly organised workers. One of Gore's standard talking points is support for a change in the labour laws and he has made it a point of meeting with workers in tough organising fights before every labour event. Joined on stage by dozens of workers fighting for union contracts, he proclaimed: "I believe the right-to-organise is a basic American right, a basic human right." He made practically the same statement on the night of his super-Tuesday primary victory.
But the limited revival in union fortunes, thanks in part to a tight labour market, could come to a screeching halt unless the Democrats hold on to the White House and regain the Congress later this year. The unions delivered in such force on Super Tuesday, the 7th March primary day covering 11 states, that CNN commentator Bill Schneider quipped: "The unions delivered like Fed Ex." The numbers tell the story: 47 per cent of the Democratic primary vote in Ohio came from union households; 40 per cent in New York; 25 per cent in California; 22 per cent in Georgia; and 35 per cent in Connecticut.
In LA itself, the union federation showed its muscle with key endorsements for Democrats in congressional primary races. All their candidates won, including in a seat near El Monte, a mostly-Latino area, where the unions retired 18-year congressman Marty Martinez in exchange for a young state representative Hilda Solis. Martinez had been 100 per cent with the unions, but on one issue: free trade. But Solis supports the unions' call for trade agreements to include strong workers' rights and environmental clauses.
This race certainly didn't go unnoticed in the Democratic congressional caucus, nor among Gore's pro-free trade inner circle. Even in a New Democrat party where yuppies join hands with workers, the dividing line in the global economy is still one that makes or breaks US politicians.
