“Reward your friends and punish your enemies,” said Samuel Gompers in 1908.  But it has never seemed harder for labor to obey Gompers’ realpolitik motto than in 2002. 

In the midterm elections, the War on Terror terrorized the Democrats, while the miasma of 2000’s defeat still lingered over the party. Even though unions gave more than ninety percent of their contributions to the Democrats in 2002, it only amounted to fifteen percent of the Democratic Party’s funds; more than two-thirds of the party’s funding came from business. Both the communications industry and the financial industry contributed more to the Democrats than did all unions put together. The strategy of organized labor since the 1980s has been to support Democrats to beat Republicans, while the basic strategy of the Democratic Party—echoed yet again by ex-President Clinton in an election postmortem—has been to repudiate organized labor.  In the topsy-turvy world of the Democratic Leadership Council, it is almost impossible to tell whom labor’s friends—and enemies—really are.

Over the past few years, the AFL-CIO has exhorted its member unions to get into politics. More union members are voting, and union members make up a critical electoral bloc.  But while unions spend time and money turning out voters, for whom are they getting out the vote?  For the first time in decades, unions are starting to break away from the party of Roosevelt, and return to their free-agent roots.  The Service Employees International Union contributed nine percent of its congressional dollars to Republicans, up from three percent in 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.  The Hotel and Restaurant Employees contributed nineteen percent of congressional dollars to Republicans, mostly representatives from California, Illinois and New York State (including a donation of $10,000 to the speaker of the house, Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert).  Other unions, like the Teamsters and the Carpenters, have made open alliances with Bush, supporting oil drilling in Alaska, lending staff to the Bush transition team, and appearing at public events with the president.  (The connection infuriates the purists at the National Right-to-Work Committee, who fear that Bush’s “principles” will be sullied by his friendships with Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., and Dave McCarron.)

But the most flamboyant example of labor’s political reversal this past electoral season was New York State.  Although New York’s unions have never acted in perfect unity—Victor Gotbaum, the first president of District Council 37-(AFCSME), the municipal workers’ union, famously remarked that there was no New York labor movement, just a bunch of unions each doing their own thing—the tradition of labor-liberalism in New York City is deep and proud.  As recently as a decade ago, labor unions worked with black and Latino organizations to elect David Dinkins mayor.  But in the 2002 gubernatorial election, about half of the state’s most important unions endorsed Republican incumbent George Pataki. Lining up behind Pataki were 1199/SEIU, UNITE!, the United Federation of Teachers, the International Association of Machinists, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, the Teamsters and the Carpenters.  The Republican governor won the election handily, trouncing Democratic candidate Carl McCall, the first African-American gubernatorial candidate in state history. McCall received endorsements from 32-BJ/SEIU, the Communication Workers of America, the Transport Workers Union, the Professional Staff Congress, AFSCME and the United Auto Workers.  But most of the private-sector unions to endorse McCall (as well as TWU and PSC) did so on the ballot line of the Working Families Party, an independent political party in New York State that usually cross-endorses Democrats. 

Not surprisingly, the Pataki endorsements have led to a season of discontent and confusion in New York’s progressive circles.  Whatever one makes of the endorsement decisions, it seems clear that the days of faithful union support for the Democrats may be ending.  For better or worse, new political strategies are starting, slowly, to emerge.

Republican Governor George Pataki’s last New York City campaign stop on the rainy Monday night before Election Day was at Terrace on the Park, a convention center in Queens.  The Terrace—a far cry from the swanky Midtown Hilton that hosted Pataki’s victory party the next night—hovered over Flushing Meadows Corona Park, perched atop concrete pillars like a penthouse minus the apartment building.  Inside the mirrored Crystal Ballroom, festooned with red, white, and blue, about one hundred fifty union members—mostly from UNITE!, United Food and Commercial Workers, and the Carpenters—held signs for Pataki.  Some were wearing Mohawk River Valley Supports Pataki buttons, and a busload seemed to have come down from Utica.  Dennis Rivera, president of Local 1199/SEIU, stood on the podium, and a tremendous scroll reading “New York United For Pataki” dangled across the back of the stage.

Pataki’s daughter, a recent college grad, spoke first to rally the crowd.  “My dad has cut taxes, protected the environment, and fought crime!”  she cried.  Then Pataki strode in, to the triumphant tune of “Back in a New York Groove.”  He celebrated the high points of his record: “We cut taxes more than any other state in America!”  He praised himself for substituting “opportunity for dependence” and shrinking the welfare rolls.  “I have always wanted to be governor of all the people,” he said.  “We are not just Republicans and Democrats, upstate and downstate, black and white, labor and management, Christian and Jew.  With your help, we will keep our unity!” 

As much as the next day’s election returns, the campaign revelry of the Queens event was a victory for the Republican Party and the national right.  As Pataki stood on the stage, in front of a crowd of cheering union members, it seemed like what historian Joshua Freeman has referred to as “working-class New York,” the Red Vienna of the United States, had finally been won over by the Republican Party.   “Are we going to go back to the failed policies of the past?”  Pataki shouted.  “NO!” came the response.

For a state that prides itself on Roosevelt and Robert Wagner, state politics leading up to Election Day was almost as depressing as the Republican victory.  Despite taking its share of hard knocks over the last decade, New York’s labor movement is much stronger than in most of the rest of the country, with one in four workers belonging to a union.  New York’s unions are confident enough to take controversial political positions, like 1199’s October full-page ad in the New York Times opposing war with Iraq.  “Nobody wanted to be in this race without labor,” says Ed Ott, the director of public policy for New York City’s Central Labor Council.  “We are not powerless.”  So why did so many New York unions endorse a classic Republican governor whose party is swinging ever further to the right?

Defenders of the endorsements say that Pataki is a moderate in a liberal state, and that his politics are significantly different from the party’s as a whole.  It is true that over the past few years, Pataki has courted unions with the verve of Cyrano.  He signed Child Health Plus, which extends Medicaid benefits to working-poor families.  This past year, he signed legislation granting card-check recognition to workers in casinos (there are not yet any casinos in New York State), and a law banning the use of state funds for union busting.

They go on to point out—rightly—that Carl McCall ran a shockingly tepid campaign.  McCall is an ex-Citibank official, described by even the New York Times as “cautious.”  He is the child of a single mother on welfare, and Time magazine described his life story as “an American dream.” But McCall’s campaign stayed away from his populist roots.  Even though he was the first African-American gubernatorial candidate in New York State, he seemed reluctant to present his campaign in terms of black and Hispanic empowerment.  Meanwhile, buses proclaiming “Amigos de Pataki” zoomed around Harlem on Election Day.  McCall said nothing about the state’s looming $2 billion deficit—a product of Pataki’s tax cuts.  Rather, the lynchpin of his economic development strategy was a tax incentive for high-wage job creation.  On the plus side, while Comptroller, McCall gave state workers a cost-of-living increase in pension funds that won him AFSCME’s endorsement, and had a history of investing the pension funds in labor-friendly projects.  He supported raising the minimum wage, increasing workers’ comp and extending unemployment benefits.  But economic justice was hardly the center of his campaign.  In short, while Pataki assiduously wooed the labor movement, McCall made it easy for unions to walk away. 

But while McCall may be no Vito Marcontonio, Pataki is no Fiorello H. LaGuardia.  He is a bland conservative who has quietly presided over an exponential increase in economic inequality in New York State. This past summer, Pataki rallied his allies in the Senate to veto an increase in the state’s minimum wage—lower than that in Massachusetts and Connecticut—after it had been approved by the state Assembly.  Workers’ compensation benefits in New York are the 41^st lowest in the nation. The number of New Yorkers without health insurance has grown over the past eight years, and while this is a national trend, Pataki has not moved to fight it. More generally, Pataki is a law-and-order politician who brought the death penalty back to New York State.  He rejoiced when a court overturned on appeal a lower court finding that New York State’s grossly unequal school funding formula is unconstitutional.  Pataki stumped for Bush in 2000, and he probably will again in 2002.  His Queens campaign speech sums it up: Pataki’s true supporters believe in him because he cut taxes, fought crime and shrank welfare.  To quote Bob Masters, the political director of the Communication Workers of America and a co-chair of the Working Families Party, “Guys like George Pataki are not out to make the world safe for labor unions.”

There have always been political disagreements within New York’s labor movement.  Despite the city’s self-image as a haven of social democracy, its labor movement has long contained a strongly conservative streak.  In the late 1960s, Local 1199 and DC 37 opposed the Vietnam War.  But workers from the building trades unions marched in support of it (they wanted, in part, to prevent affirmative action in the construction industry).  The state federation of labor endorsed Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1970. And on a national level, many Reagan Democrats have yet to return to the fold: 37 percent of union voters supported Bush in the 2000 election.  So 2002’s surprise wasn’t just that labor unions endorsed Pataki. It was which unions did so. 

In New York’s labor movement, the biggest shockers of endorsement season were the Pataki endorsements from 1199/SEIU and UNITE!. 1199 and UNITE! are both unions with long histories in social-movement politics.  Local 1199 began when Communists who had been fired from the City University system joined with pharmacy workers to organize hospital workers, whose right to organize was not at that time recognized by the law.  It sent people to southern cities during the civil rights movement, and earned the moniker of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite union.  UNITE! is the descendent of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.  The Amalgamated was one of the first industrial unions in the United States, whose members once prided themselves on a network of union co-ops, health care centers and banks run by the union, while the ILGWU was founded out of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.  Today, both UNITE! and 1199 represent low-wage workers, predominantly non-white.  Dennis Rivera, the president of 1199, was a student radical elected union president in a 1980s reform movement, while the president of UNITE!, Bruce Raynor, once organized at J.P. Stevens, one of the most repressive textile factories in North Carolina (and the basis for the movie Norma Rae).  Despite their historical similarities, the two unions are in very different positions today.  Thanks to its merger with SEIU, 1199 is stronger and larger than it has ever been in the past.  By contrast, UNITE!, is a struggling union, constantly fighting job flight overseas.  Why did these two unions—similar in their radical pasts, different in their current strength—both choose to endorse the Republican governor?

Few New York unions would have dared to endorse Pataki if 1199 hadn’t gone first, giving its endorsement way back in January 2002.  The decision was made by a fairly narrow stratum of the union’s top leadership, following defeat in the mayoral election and the chaos of 9/11.  Contracts for the three largest groups of 1199 workers—hospital workers, home health aides and nursing home workers—were due to expire at the end of 2001, only a few months after 9/11.  The union had endorsed a losing candidate, Fernando Ferrer, in the mayoral race—itself a contested decision.  As New York slid into terrorism-induced recession, the union felt it was in a weak political position to place demands on state finances.  Instead of entering a protracted, tense battle for a new contract, 1199 gave Pataki its endorsement.  In return, health care workers won a 10% wage increase over the life of the contract, which was funded by the privatization of Empire Blue Cross-Blue Shield, the state’s largest non-profit health insurance agency.  The union also avoided any givebacks in benefits for members.  (The money from privatization had been slated for low-income health insurance providers, but might well have gone to balance the state’s budget deficit instead.)

            No one in 1199’s leadership agreed to be interviewed on the record for this article.  But it seems clear that ambivalence lingers about the choice.  In New York City, there was a notable absence of rank-and-file presence for get-out-the-vote.  Although the union has a very active political program—thirty-five percent  of the union’s membership contributes to its PAC—few 1199 members were in the streets or on the phones doing turnout for Pataki.  The decision to endorse was voted on by the union’s Executive Council (about one hundred people, including some member delegates).  No vote was taken at a larger membership meeting or delegate’s assembly, and it remains unclear how many 1199 members actually followed their union’s recommendation. Activists within the union suggest that one difficulty with not taking political decisions to delegates and members is that they may grow alienated from the union’s politics.  Marilyn Albert, a longtime 1199 activist and a nurse at Beth Israel Hospital, says, “if the union doesn’t build a sense of ownership among the members through a dynamic relationship between the leadership and the members, the union ultimately will be weakened.  We are a strong union, but we could be even stronger with a high level of membership participation.” 

On the other side of the spectrum is UNITE!.  Unlike 1199, UNITE!’s leaders are happy to talk about their union’s new political program.  Chris Chafe, the union’s political director, says that Pataki is a liberal Republican, who “represents a very unique slice of the moderate wing of the Republican Party in his willingness to work with labor’s agenda.”  (UNITE! donated very little money to national Republican campaigns.) The union’s president, Bruce Raynor, says Pataki’s prohibition of the use of state funds for union-busting and the bill permitting card-check in casinos were the most important in winning UNITE!’s endorsement.  Earlier this year, the state legislature passed procurement legislation, mandating that the state buy uniforms made under decent working conditions.  But while Raynor sees positive reasons to support Pataki, there is no question that he also glories in spurning the Democrats who passed NAFTA.  He says, “We wanted to send a message to the Democrats that we can’t be taken for granted any more.”

There is, it should be noted, one other important way that Pataki has helped UNITE!.  According to Chafe, 9/11 severely damaged garment factories located in lower Manhattan.  Thousands of UNITE!’s members lost their jobs, and many are still unemployed.  “We faced a crisis going into negotiations regarding how to maintain health benefits for our membership,” says Chafe.  “The employers were clear that they were not going to meet our demands.”  So the state enrolled UNITE! workers in its public health programs, but allowed them to continue to use the UNITE! health center, making sure no one lost medical coverage and keeping the center afloat.

Unlike 1199, UNITE! devoted significant political resources to Pataki’s re-election.  Members were phone-banked for about three weeks before the election.  A mailer went out to all members and retirees, there were three pieces of workplace literature, and about 300 volunteers were on the ground for Election Day in New York City alone.  “People who are running for office clearly understand that the labor movement is the most potent form of get-out-the-vote and voter education in this country,” says Chafe.  “It is an almost guaranteed ground operation, and we are setting a higher standard with a clear agenda that needs to be met in order to gain that kind of operation.”

But how high is a standard that falls short of raising the minimum wage? Asked how he feels about endorsing a candidate whose party rejects the core values of the labor movement, Raynor responds, “There are plenty of people who talk about how much they love us, but don’t do anything to help.  I guess I’d rather have the help without the love than the love without the help.”  While the union clearly hopes to use its vote-moving abilities to force Democrats back to the fold, its leaders also bend over backwards to praise Pataki.  Maura Keaney, the director of UNITE!’s New York State Council, says that Pataki was simply the candidate most interested in protecting working families.  “Whatever party he was a member of—Republican, Democrat, Communist—we would endorse him.  It isn’t about party for us any more.  We think Governor Pataki is the best choice.”

Within New York’s labor movement, the Pataki endorsements have been the subject of great conflict.  There are some surprising people who see the unions’ choice as savvy politics.  Larry Moskowitz, the labor co-ordinator of the Working Families Party, says that he is loath to criticize 1199 or other unions supporting Pataki—even though they are Working Families Party affiliates.  “My stomach turns at the criticism of 1199 and the deal,” he says.  “This isn’t crumbs from the kitchen table.  This is the whole kitchen.”  He denounces armchair radicals who are angry about the endorsement.  “Harry Bridges would have signed this deal.  John L. Lewis would have signed this deal.”  For Moskowitz, endorsing Republicans demands a courageous realism.  “You have to put yourselves in the shoes of a labor leader who says, how to get $1.8 billion for my members?  Show me the other way to get that done this year, or three years from now.  Don’t tell me it’s 20 years away.”  Finally, he says, the Democrats have done nothing for labor lately.  “If the Democrats were still the party of Roosevelt, if they were even the party of Kennedy and Johnson, would we have this situation today?”  Not that Moskowitz is happy about the prisoner’s dilemma that traps unions.  Says Dan Cantor, the executive director of the WFP, “while it [the endorsement] is good for individual unions, and also understandable, it is intensely depressing.  What the unions are doing is moving the right to the center, not the center to the left.” 

Other labor leaders—all of whom are also involved with the WFP—are much more critical of the choice.  Two of the unions to stay away from the Republicans are the United Auto Workers (which has been growing rapidly in New York State, thanks to its organizing efforts in white-collar workplaces) and the Communications Workers of America.  Since these unions deal primarily with private-sector companies like Verizon and non-profits like New York University, Pataki can offer them nothing without alienating his core support among businessmen (including university trustees).  Bob Master (a WFP co-chair and political action chair of CWA District 1) says, “Our main employer is Verizon, and there was never any wisp of a hope that George Pataki would oppose Verizon on anything.”  He goes on, “It is true that he has done certain things for specific unions in exchange for endorsements, but when it comes to private sector unions he has delivered virtually nothing.  When you have an $89 billion budget, you have a lot of money to buy people off.”

Master says he understands why Rivera endorsed Pataki: “It’s hard to imagine any labor leader turning down the deal that Dennis Rivera got.”  But while 1199 may have been forced to make the best of a bad situation, Master thinks that over time, endorsing Republicans is a “self-defeating” strategy.  “When you endorse a guy like Pataki, you make the whole environment worse.”  Phil Wheeler, the director of Region 9A of the United Auto Workers, says that he can’t see why any labor union would support Pataki.  The interests of a labor union can’t be separated from those of workers in general.  “We certainly hear of different things that different unions might have gotten under Pataki, but last I remember we are not a special interest group, we are a labor movement.  What matters is not just what we can get for our members, but for working families in general and for the labor movement as a whole.”

For Master and Wheeler, it is not only principled but also pragmatic to advocate a broad left politics.  Both of them argue that unions win organizing victories when they speak for social justice.  Labor grows by allying with larger social movements—like the civil rights movement, the fight for social security, and the struggle for the eight-hour day and the minimum wage.  Without being part of a broader movement for social and economic justice, the labor movement cannot hope to organize more workers.  To survive at all, unions must have the courage to be radical.  “The labor movement flourishes when it works for the general interests of working people,” says Master.  “If you look back at the brief periods when labor grew quickly, it was when the labor movement had a broad social agenda.”  Master suggests that it is in the long-term interests of the labor movement to advocate for all working people, and to fight the temptation to “retreat even further into the notion that they [unions] should only pursue the narrow interest of their members,” instead of struggling to shift the terms of political debate. 

In the end, the Pataki endorsements need to be understood in terms of the collapse of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for progressive politics—both in New York State and nationally.  The Democrats, of course, have never been solely or even primarily a labor party on the European model.  Even during the New Deal, they were the party of segregation and the Solid South. At this point, the Democrats are divided and incoherent.  They are a franchise label, not a political party. Ever since Carter repudiated the New Deal, significant factions within the party have not wanted to touch labor rights. What this means is that over the past twenty-five years, even as it has sought to bring the politics of the Democratic party back to that of its working-class base, the American labor movement has fought rising inequality in the workplace essentially alone—without the help of a political party devoted to the needs of the American working class. 

Facing a future without obvious political allies, unions seem to have four possible strategies.  The first is that of 1199 and UNITE!.  According to this philosophy, each union should simply strike the best deal it can get for its members. Endorsements should be given out based on what candidates promise for union members, regardless of their broader ideological stances.  Parties will compete for labor votes by offering better deals, and perhaps once the Democrats face life without labor, they will start to move back to the left.  But this is a politics of diminishing returns.  Each political party will ultimately be confined in the deals it can afford to make with labor.  Both parties are so dominated by business interests—financially and ideologically—that they will not likely be able or willing to make that many deals with unions, especially not about the things that matter most (like labor law reform or raising the minimum wage).  Beyond this, while it is good for the whole labor movement for one union to win a good contract, by making deals with politicians to benefit their members, unions risk abandoning politics altogether. Deals which are good for the members of one union are not necessarily good for members of other unions, let alone working people in general.  A governor who slashes welfare, cuts taxes, cuts and privatizes public services, locks people up, blocks efforts to redress the state’s unequal education funding, campaigns for an anti-union president and can’t even be bothered to raise the minimum wage in an election year is not likely to help the labor movement in the long run—and maybe not even in the next contract negotiations.

The second strategy is that of the Working Families Party.  This means building a political organization that UNITE!’s unions and community activist groups, organizing year-round for specific legislative battles as well as elections, exerting pressure on the Democrats in elections and eventually perhaps running independent candidates.  The Working Families Party is supported by some of the most progressive locals in New York and has played a very positive role in co-ordinating living wage campaigns (for example, in Suffolk County) and in last summer’s push for a higher minimum wage.  The party brings together many of the most admirable leftists in the labor movement and joins unions to other community organizations.  But at the same time, the WFP faces some major obstacles, especially in its electoral strategy.  It risks mobilizing people and resources for Democratic candidates—like Carl McCall—who do not agree with the WFP’s program and have no particular history as a champion of unions or working people.  While it’s good to build an independent party, and to gather people year round, the WFP’s ability to inspire and organize may ultimately be undermined by the fact that it is, in the end, trying to rally support for mundane Democrats. 

These two strategies are the ones currently being seriously considered by unions in New York and elsewhere.  But the implosion of the Democrats should open us to other political possibilities.  Imagine what might happen if unions got together and devoted their resources towards founding a third party (or if the WFP started to run its own candidates). Union PAC money could to go towards developing a coherent strategy and a new institution.  Even if its candidates didn’t win right away—and it seems like in a state like New York, union-supported candidates might do reasonably well—it would shift the terms of political debate.  And it would give union members and activists a candidate to work for with passion and without compromise.  (Tony Mazzochi’s Labor Party was an effort in this direction, but it never ran candidates or had the commitment of member unions.)  

Alternately, unions could give up on electoral politics.  The labor movement could concentrate on building the ground troops of the global social justice movement, funding rallies and demonstrations instead of the Democrats.  Rather than change politics by giving cash and position papers to candidates running for office, it could try to organize its members to a deeper left politics.  After all, unions did not organize millions of industrial workers in the 1930s by funding the Democratic Party, and the democrats did not grow more sympathetic to labor because of endorsements.  Nor did the civil rights movement triumph by funneling money to Lyndon Johnson.  The power of the labor movement comes as much through mass mobilization as it does from whispers in the halls of Congress.  Seriously pursuing strategies of mass organization would require a different labor movement—one capable, in the words of Ed Ott, of finding “an eight-hour day for the twenty-first century.” Labor’s predicament, Ott says, is “not the fault of any one union.”  But the question that all unions face “is whether we are a movement or not.”  Given the depressing outcome of the last few elections, it is starting to seem like the so-called “realists” are the true ideologues, haplessly committed to a program bound to fail, while the idealists and dreamers of the labor movement might be the people talking sense.