Union reaches out and touches voters

Tony Moreno is talking about the weak economy and about jobs lost to outsourcing. He's trying to sell a Barack Obama presidency -- one union member to another.

But Moreno is in Los Angeles and the union member he's talking to is in Pennsylvania.

Moreno, a part-time cook at Sony studios and member of Unite Here Local 11, has volunteered at a bustling phone bank run by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. And all the calls he's making are long distance.

At the height of the presidential race, Los Angeles County is operating the largest interstate call center in the AFL-CIO's political effort, a $53-million national campaign. The effort is aimed at getting the union's mostly Democratic members to show up at the polls and to sway undecided voters -- particularly in battleground states.

"We challenged ourselves to do this," said Maria Elena Durazo, head of the politically powerful L.A. County labor group. "We feel very confident about our capacity to deal with the local ballot measures and also figure out how to be helpful to electing Obama."

Six days a week, 125 workers gather at four union halls across the county and don telephone headsets hooked up to personal computers. A central computer at each location speed-dials numbers from a database provided by the national campaign. When someone answers, a union worker is patched through and begins the pitch.

"We're calling fellow members of the AFL-CIO," one volunteer said on a recent evening. "We're wondering if we could count on your support for Barack Obama?"

About half the time, the conversations end in a quick yes, they said. Others go longer. Whatever the answer -- yes, no or maybe -- it is entered into the database, which is e-mailed back to campaign headquarters.

In 2000, it would have been more difficult to coordinate an effort like this, said Mike Podhorzer, deputy political director for the AFL-CIO, because database tools were less sophisticated and it was more cumbersome to transfer the enormous data files that make up the call list.

"If someone in Colorado makes a call to a union member in Colorado and finds out that they're an Obama supporter, within 24 hours that gets put back in our database, and when we cut the next list for L.A., we can cut that name off the list," Podhorzer said. "Being able to merge that close to real time is something that's borne of the Internet and broadband technology."