Profile Low, Union Influence High in Dukakis Campaign

Labor’s role in the presidential election finally will become more visible after Aug. 24, the day Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis accepts the formal endorsement of the AFL-CIO at a meeting in Washington of about 250 of the nation’s top union leaders.

As part of the political strategy of both Dukakis and union officials, however, labor will continue to keep a relatively low profile in the campaign.

On one hand, unions have been more active inside the Democratic Party than ever and they are planning a massive campaign to help put Dukakis in the White House and end eight devastating years for unions under the Reagan-Bush Administration.

On the other hand, Dukakis and union leaders are minimizing, or at least not emphasizing, the significant role labor really is expected to play in the campaign. As one top AFL-CIO executive put it, “We don’t have to flack (publicize) our activities. It is self-evident.”

The low profile role of labor in the election stems partly from the unfair charge made in 1984 by Ohio Sen. John Glenn and Gary Hart, then a Colorado senator, that Walter Mondale had somehow become a “captive” of organized labor because the AFL-CIO endorsed him instead of either of them for president before the primaries.

President Reagan thought so little of that “accusation” that he didn’t use it himself in his campaign against Mondale, perhaps because he and Vice President George Bush were concerned that, in a counterattack, they would be hit with the “special interest” charge since they have close ties to leaders of the nation’s largest corporations. Although Bush is still vulnerable to that charge, many union leaders and Dukakis reportedly decided to avoid giving Bush the chance of using the Glenn/Hart gambit of attacking Dukakis as labor’s captive.

Apparently to implement that strategy, Dukakis has made a speech in person to only one of the many recent major national union conventions where he could have appealed directly to thousands of union activists for help. Nor has he been seen on union picket lines or at labor rallies.

In contrast, just after the Democratic convention ended, Dukakis, in a widely reported address, told the entire delegation of the Rev. Jesse Jackson that he wanted them, needed them, and dramatically declared, “I cannot win without you.”

Since Jackson has such a large following, the Dukakis plea to them was not out of place, but it also was seen as a plea for support to the black community, not just Jackson.

There was a record number of delegates from labor at the convention, but Dukakis made no public appeal for support from them.

Instead, he met privately for breakfast with AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and his wife, Irena; AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Thomas Donahue and his wife, Rachel Horowitz, who is political director of the American Federation of Teachers, and Kenneth Young, executive assistant to Kirkland, and Young’s wife, Charlotte.

It was a very informal affair. They discussed ways to coordinate efforts for a Dukakis victory, and the warm relationships they have with one another was evidenced by their light-hearted conversation.

Another private meeting came last week when officers of seven of the country’s most politically active unions met with top Dukakis aides to discuss in more detail campaign coordination, ways to avoid even the appearance of differences on issues and the creation of a business-labor campaign advisory council that might be continued into a Dukakis Administration.

Those private top-level meetings went well, but there have been hitches in some planned public rallies for Dukakis. For instance, several planned union local and regional meetings were canceled because of what staff officials said simply were scheduling conflicts.

But the cancellations stirred some anger. William R. Robertson, head of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation, said Dukakis campaign staffers “seem to want to almost ignore us in public while privately sending us urgent appeals for help. That doesn’t help us build enthusiasm for Dukakis.”

A top AFL-CIO executive in Washington, however, countered that “Dukakis doesn’t need to stroke us to get our help. We need a friend in the White House, and Dukakis is going to be that friend.”

And unions hardly have been invisible in the campaign.

About one-fourth of the delegates at the Democratic convention in Atlanta were from unions.

Union leaders made up almost one-third of the important 13-member Democratic Party platform drafting committee, and labor has a record number of members on the Democratic National Committee.

Labor’s planned massive drive to get union members to register and vote can provide Dukakis the edge he needs to get to the White House. Until last week, all unions had lined up behind Dukakis, including even the Teamsters union, which supported the Reagan-Bush ticket in 1980 and 1984.

That solid front may have been broken July 29 by William McCarthy, the newly appointed Teamster president. McCarthy, a native of Boston, told a closed meeting of the union’s executive board that he never backed Dukakis in any of his previous campaigns and will not back him this time, either.

Many other Teamster leaders want Dukakis, however. They may fight the effort by McCarthy, who has been linked to the mob by a 1984 memo to the FBI from then-Teamster President Jackie Presser, to drop their union’s planned endorsement of Dukakis.

For the labor movement as a whole, the need for a Dukakis victory over Bush is painfully obvious. Unions have been badly hurt during the Reagan-Bush years. When that team went to the White House, unions represented 24% of the work force. Today, they represent only 17%, down almost one-third.

Obviously, the decline was not due just to the anti-union animus of the Reagan-Bush Administration, and it is not going to be reversed overnight if Dukakis becomes president.

But based on his actions as governor of Massachusetts, the policies and appointees of Dukakis in the White House generally would be in accord with organized labor.

And any differences that may arise will seem negligible compared to the vast differences between labor and the Reagan Administration.

Fringes May Not Be So Generous, Study Finds

For years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has calculated the cost of fringe benefits in a “peculiar way” that seems designed to suggest how generous employers are to their workers, observes Daniel Mitchell, director of UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations.

In its first new study of wages and benefits in several years, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that employers may have gotten more credit than they deserve.

The way the Chamber figures it, fringe benefits such as health insurance and pensions amount to 37.6% of wages for the average worker, which blurs the statistical reality.

The bureau, though, reports that fringe benefits average just 27.3% of compensation, well below the Chamber’s figure, which has been accepted widely because the bureau hasn’t been putting out its own wage and benefit survey.

The Chamber didn’t doctor any statistics. It just estimated fringes as a percent of wages alone. The bureau, however, used the standard statistical procedure for figuring fringes as a percent of the total compensation to workers, including the fringes themselves.

The government study also pointed out the overall advantage that union workers have over non-union ones: The average union worker received $18.16 an hour in wages and fringes, compared to $12.90 for the average non-union worker--a healthy 40.8% differential.

The Chamber likes its way of measuring fringe benefits so well that it offered to sell the government its data for just $20. A Chamber official insists that the offer was made only to save taxpayers some money.

But if the government bought the Chamber’s study, that would eliminate the bureau’s study, the only major independent study of fringes. We might again be led to believe that employers are doling out fringe benefits to their workers more generously than they really are.