Union of Government Workers Seeks to Build Political Muscle
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
August 11, 2006
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees announced plans yesterday to spend $60 million more a year to campaign for universal health coverage, to unionize 70,000 workers annually and to register 280,000 union members to vote.
The union, the largest of the 53 unions in the A.F.L.-C.I.O., announced what it called a 21st Century Initiative, pledging to become one of the most aggressive unions in organizing and in politics.
With this initiative, the union appears to have taken to heart criticism that organized labor has been lackadaisical about seeking to reverse its decline.
“We looked at ourselves in the mirror and decided that we needed to change,” the union’s president, Gerald W. McEntee, said in a news conference in Chicago. He said the union planned to increase members’
dues by $12 million in 2007, $36 million in 2008 and $60 million in 2009. That would give it a far larger budget to build political power, increase public support for public services, expand the union, and intensify member involvement.
Mr. McEntee, who is chairman of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political committee and has been one of labor’s foremost critics of President Bush, said his union would get 40,000 union volunteers to work in this fall’s campaign and to ensure that 90 percent of the union’s 1.4 million members were registered to vote. Currently, 70 percent are.
“The simple fact is workers are under attack by the most antiworker president and Congress in our history,” he said. “We face budget cuts, service cuts and benefit cuts.”
He said too many workers have had to forgo wage increases to maintain their health benefits. He also complained that Republican governors in Indiana and Missouri had stripped many government workers of their ability to bargain collectively.
The union is planning a campaign to tell the public and government leaders about the value of public employees and services. As a union of government employees, the state, county and municipal employees are especially hurt by budget cuts and the privatization of services.
To increase its political clout, Mr. McEntee said the union hoped to persuade a quarter of its members to donate at least $100 a year to the union’s political action committee, which would yield about $35 million a year.
Mr. McEntee said the union organized 33,000 workers last year, and in the past two years, tens of thousands of home health care workers and child care workers in California, Iowa, Oregon and other states.
The union took the lead among labor unions in beating back Mr. Bush’s plan for a partial privatization of Social Security. Mr. McEntee said his union would push for Canadian-style universal health coverage but acknowledged that the nation might not be ripe for such an idea.