Labor's Lost Love

Over the last 20 years, the labor movement has poured billions of our members' hard-earned dollars into electoral politics -- and we've gotten very little to show for it except a weaker labor movement, too many election day whuppings and too many politicians who, when they do win, promptly turn their backs on working men and women. It's time we turned off the spigot and put the money to better use.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that between 1979 and 2004, unions gave about $500 million in direct contributions to candidates for federal office. From 1998 to 2004, unions lavished about $600 million on political parties. And unions paid $100 million to 527s (independent political action committees) in 2004. That's $1.2 billion in cash -- not counting money spent on the parties from 1980 to 1998 and labor's own effort to get its members out to vote. A few union political experts tell me unions spend seven to 10 times what they give candidates and parties on internal political mobilization. So we're talking $8 billion to as much as $12 billion on federal elections alone.

What have we gotten for that? For the last 25 years, employers have broken labor laws with impunity and fired tens of thousands of workers trying to organize. By every measure, life for most workers has become more difficult. Few politicians challenge the right of corporations to run the workplace like a dictatorship. We've lived almost entirely under Republican presidents -- the exception being Bill Clinton's eight years. Even those years hurt us, as Clinton aggressively lobbied for the North American Free Trade Agreement and enthusiastically embraced its dubious premise -- an unmitigated disaster for American and foreign workers. His secretary of Labor was pro-NAFTA, did virtually nothing to push for the real right to organize a union and, instead, advocated a now-discredited liberal, elitist view that we should not worry about the global economy as long as dumb workers retrained themselves.

During the Clinton years, labor could not get a bill passed that would have prevented strikers from being permanently replaced. The reason? The two Democratic senators from Arkansas, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor, refused to provide the two votes that would have ended a Republican filibuster. We got exactly what we should have expected -- a few crumbs.