Iowa contest creates split among unions

By John Marelius, staff writer. Union-Tribune. January 11, 2004.

GRIMES, Iowa - It was 2 degrees and dawn wouldn't break for more than an hour. So the hot coffee and fresh doughnuts offered by union representatives were an easy sell for the workers about to begin their morning shifts plowing snow and repairing roads.

What the organizers from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees were also pitching - going to the Iowa precinct caucuses to vote for Howard Dean - wasn't such an easy sell.

As workers meandered into the lunchroom in a remote Iowa Department of Transportation facility west of Des Moines, equipment operator Tom Bengle let it be known that he was no fan of President Bush.

"Jobs keep leaving the country," he complained loudly. "They're even making our tractors in France. I broke a window last summer; it took two months to send a new one over from France."

"Does that (tick) you off enough to go to your caucus?" AFSCME representative Laura Wentworth asked.

"I don't go to them," Bengle replied. "I don't like meetings."

With the nation's first presidential nominating contests just over a week away, armies of union members are knocking on doors, making telephone calls and patrolling workplaces across Iowa to drum up support for certain Democratic presidential candidates - mostly former Vermont Gov. Dean or Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt.

In the 2004 Democratic presidential race, organized labor is a political house divided, splitting roughly along blue-collar and white-collar lines. The traditional industrial unions are backing Gephardt, while unions representing service and government workers are supporting Dean.

"We've seen a division open up between old labor and new labor," said Dennis Goldford, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, the state capital.

The labor movement has become even more fragmented, with a number of some local police and firefighters unions campaigning for Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and postal workers supporting Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

Plus, union membership is eroding in Iowa, as it is in most of the country.

Mark Smith, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor, said there are 135,000 AFL-CIO members in Iowa, plus 30,000 unionized teachers and 5,000 electrical workers not affiliated with the AFL-CIO. That, he said, is down from 215,000 in all three groups just 15 years ago.

Divided and declining though it might be, labor is by far the most powerful force in the state's Democratic caucuses, where organizing is crucial. Unlike those in a conventional election, Iowa voters must be persuaded to spend a couple of hours at a meeting on a Monday night in the dead of winter.

Goldford said that even though union members make up less than 15 percent of the work force, they carry twice the heft proportionally in Iowa than they do nationwide.

With the aid of union members airlifted in from across the country, the battle is being waged vote by vote in a labor-intensive and time-consuming way.

Wentworth, an AFSCME representative from Everett, Wash., figured that the hour or so she spent serving coffee and doughnuts to 16 highway workers might result in one or two votes for Dean at the caucuses.

The Gephardt troops are taking the same approach.

"We may drive two hours to visit four people. We've targeted it that intensely," said Donald Kaniewski, an official of the Laborers' International Union who is helping the Alliance for Economic Justice, a coalition of 17 unions that is campaigning for the Missouri congressman.

Gephardt's long-standing, resolute opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and other international trade pacts that industrial unions blame for the export of tens of thousands of their jobs is the rallying point for his candidacy.

Dean supported NAFTA but now says it's flawed and needs to be revised.

"That's a totally unacceptable position for a working person," John Campbell, a steelworker at the Bridgestone Firestone plant in Des Moines, said of Dean's stance during a recent Gephardt rally at nearby Grand View College.

Gephardt supporters say the government workers backing Dean can afford to do so because they don't have to worry about their jobs being shipped overseas.

"He doesn't have one member of one union who is worried about losing their job to Mexico," said Bill Burton, Gephardt's Iowa press secretary.

Government employees who have their own worries - namely budget cuts by financially strapped state and local governments - take offense at such talk.

"With public employees, it's not whether our jobs are going to Mexico," said Jonathan Rowat, a Polk County social worker and AFSCME organizer. "It's whether they're going to be there (at all)."

Trade was a major part of Gephardt's platform when he won the Iowa caucuses during his unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination in 1988. As a political issue, trade was still in its infancy, but Gephardt clearly touched a nerve with it.

"When we were out in '88, it was very clear that Dick was a little bit ahead of the posse in terms of the trade issue," said Bill Carrick, a consultant to the past and present Gephardt presidential campaigns.

"I think the impact of NAFTA and now the China trade deal is that it's no longer just an industrial union issue," Carrick said. "There are a lot of white-collar jobs that have been affected by trade, so the argument has got a lot more power to it."

As the 2004 campaign was taking shape, there was much speculation that labor would put up a united front behind Gephardt as it did with Al Gore in 2000 and Bill Clinton in 1996.

The AFL-CIO, however, declined to make a pre-primary endorsement.

And then Dean captured the endorsements of the feuding AFSCME and Service Employees International Union in the same week. That coup helped undercut the stereotype of Dean as the candidate solely of northeastern liberal elites.

"Going into the campaign, the expectation was that Gephardt would have all of labor locked up," said Peverill Squier, a professor of political science at the University of Iowa. "Dean has come along and picked the lock. That comes as a shock to Gephardt because he's the candidate that has always been there for labor."

Union leaders campaigning for Gephardt still act stunned that there would even be debate within the labor movement about who to endorse. "Dick Gephardt is labor's candidate," said Kaniewski of the Alliance for Economic Justice. "He's the guy that all labor should be supporting. His record demands that support."

Dean loyalists say they have nothing against Gephardt; they just regard him as yesterday's news. They contend that while Gephardt might appeal to tried-and-true Democratic stalwarts, Dean has inspired a whole new generation to get involved in the political process.

"He's energizing all kinds of new people, including our younger members," said Marcia Nichols, Iowa legislative political director for AFSCME. Besides, she said, trade isn't the only issue that affects workers.

"Everybody knows somebody who's been hit by the Bush administration," Nichols said. "You know somebody who's lost their job or been cut off of public assistance or lost their union rights or doesn't have health care for their kid. Howard Dean's the symbol of change right now."

John Marelius: john.marelius@uniontrib.com

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