Right-to-Work Referendum May Affect Senate Race : Union Issue Stirs Idaho Campaign

The battle has raged off and on for 30 years.

Now, in a bitterly fought referendum with implications reaching far beyond the borders of the sparsely populated “Gem State,” Idaho is about to decide finally whether it wants to repeal a “right-to-work” law making it illegal for an employer to require a worker to pay union dues to keep a job.

During the final hours before county registrars closed the election rolls across the state last Friday, thousands of new voters waited in line to qualify for next Tuesday’s elections.

‘Very Emotional’

“The referendum is getting people out to vote because the people who are against the right-to-work law are very emotional about it,” said Republican Sen. Steven D. Symms, who is running for reelection in a neck-and-neck race with Democratic Gov. John V. Evans. “But I think we are going to remain a right-to-work state by one or two percentage points.”

In 1958, the last time the issue was on the ballot, the right-to-work controversy shook Idaho to its political bones, giving Democrats control of the Legislature and leaving Republican Gov. Robert Smylie a lonely survivor in the Statehouse.

Right-to-work was also on the ballot that year in California, where Democrats won similar successes, with the right-to-work measure losing by more than a million votes and helping Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown win the governorship.

The Idaho law now on the books was put there by the Republican Legislature in January, 1985, over Evans’ veto--a circumstance that has added special venom to the Symms-Evans contest.

National Interest

But the campaign leading to the right-to-work showdown next week is being closely watched nationwide for reasons that have little to do with local politics. National right-to-work leaders hope that the Idaho vote will provide momentum for future efforts to add states to the list of 20 that now have these laws, long considered anathema to organized labor.

More importantly at the moment, however, the Idaho right-to-work referendum could have a significant impact on whether the Republicans or the Democrats control the U.S. Senate next year. The conventional wisdom has been that a huge turnout generated by the referendum would favor the Democrats on the ballot.

“This is a more critical election than we’ve ever had in Idaho, because we’re determining what direction this nation will take,” state GOP Chairman Blake Hall said.

Economy Suffering

The referendum comes at a time when Idaho’s farming, mining and timber industries are all suffering. As the state desperately seeks to shore up its economy, the right-to-work proponents insist that the controversial 18-month-old law has to be preserved so that Idaho can attract new industry to the state. Labor, however, contends that the law offers nothing but the certainty of lower wages and benefits for Idaho workers.

The theory of a union shop, which right-to-work laws prohibit, is that a company must bargain in good faith with a union representing its workers, if a majority of them have voted for union representation. Right-to-work opponents argue that all workers should share the costs of negotiating a union’s contract, because under federal law all workers share in its benefits. Proponents of such laws, however, argue that this is “compulsory unionism.”

To emphasize the importance that the GOP attaches to Idaho, President Reagan will come to Twin Falls for one of his final campaign stops Friday, hoping to rally Republican support for Symms next Tuesday. Vice President George Bush was in southern Idaho last week, for the third time this year, and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Sen. Paul Laxalt (R-Nev.) are expected to campaign for Symms this week.

Scarcely Mention It

So intense has been the battle between the right-to-work forces and the labor-supported Idaho Committee Against Deception that the candidates themselves scarcely mention the referendum, either because they believe that it is too risky or consider it no longer necessary to restate their positions.

At times, the impending referendum has threatened to overshadow the Senate race and the close gubernatorial contest between former Democratic Gov. Cecil D. Andrus and Republican Lt. Gov. David LeRoy.

Months ago, the Idaho Freedom to Work Committee recruited film star Charlton Heston, a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, to tape a commercial supporting the Idaho statute. He has been the centerpiece of a high-powered campaign designed to show that “powerful union bosses” control organized labor and have caused a devastating decline in the Idaho silver mining industry.

Union Repercussions

Heston’s part in the Idaho debate--he has been joined by lesser known Hollywood actors, including Rory Calhoun and “General Hospital” star Don Galloway--generated repercussions all the way to the board room of the Screen Actors Guild. There was even a momentary move in the union to withdraw Heston’s lifetime membership.

His role moved Patty Duke, incumbent president of the Screen Actors Guild, to come to Idaho and film a commercial for the Idaho Committee Against Deception, which gleefully showed her surrounded by the family of her Idaho-born husband as she declared that “right-to-work laws weaken unions. . . . That means lower wages and fewer benefits for all workers, union and non-union.”

The Republican Party, aware that the size of the voter turnout will be a key next week, laid plans recently for its first organized effort to get GOP voters to the polls here. Its theme, and a predominant theme of the Symms campaign, is that the loss of the Idaho Senate seat would mean the loss of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats.

Cites Kennedys

Traveling in a campaign bus for most of the last three weeks, Symms reminded supporters over and over that a change in the Senate majority would see conservative Western Republicans replaced “by the Kennedys and other friends of my opponent” in powerful committee chairmanships--among them Idaho colleague James A. McClure, as head of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

In one of the country’s most conservative states, he has set out to portray Evans, a Stanford University economics graduate who has never lost an Idaho political race, as a friend of Eastern liberals who fails conservative litmus tests on matters such as school prayer and who changes his positions when outside the state.

Evans, for his part, characterizes himself as a conservative and places Symms “on the very fringe of the ultraconservative wing of the party,” reminding voters that Symms was “the only one in the Senate who supported the cop-killer bullet. . . . “

Considering Idaho’s conservatism and the President’s popularity here, Symms’ Senate seat might have seemed relatively safe. However, the freshman senator’s reelection became much less than certain when Democrats fielded a ticket headed by their party’s best-known leaders and succeeded in calling the right-to-work referendum.

Even Race Claimed

Starting far behind, the Idaho Committee Against Deception says it has closed the gap by 30 points to pull even in the fight to repeal the law.

The question is the thousands of new voters who will turn out for the first time next week.

In Boise, newcomers to the state and 18-year-olds eligible to cast their first votes waited nearly an hour to enroll last week. There were similar scenes up and down the spectacular mountain valleys, from the Republican stronghold at Twin Falls to the union territory at Pocatello, and up north to the Panhandle’s depressed silver mining country.

“The surveys we take show that, in the 18-35 age group, I’ll get 75%,” Symms said. But James Kerns, state AFL-CIO president, declared: “The new voters aren’t theirs.”

Aboard his campaign bus in the Wood River Valley during the dying days of the campaign, Symms acknowledged that he expects the vote in the Senate race to generally parallel the vote in the right-to-work referendum.

He also expressed concern that, despite the long campaign, voters remain confused. On the ballot, a “yes” vote is to retain right-to-work.

But, the senator said, “a conservative’s natural inclination is, if you are unsure what an issue is, to automatically vote ‘no.’ That’s my rule of thumb in Congress--when in doubt, vote against it. Nine out of 10 times, it’s the right vote.”