Clinton Can’t Afford to Lose Unions

Some influential campaign advisers to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton are making a serious blunder by trying to persuade him to loosen the Democratic Party’s traditional ties with unions. He urgently needs those ties to win in November.

It’s a dumb idea. Clinton would alienate union activists across the country if he accepted that advice, which he hasn’t so far, but those advisers aren’t through trying.

Advocates of the strategy figure that the governor can attract moderate to conservative voters who might be anti-union by taking a few slaps at unions and keeping them in the campaign background. He would do better taking the opposite course.

I had heard from several union sources that Mickey Kantor, manager of Clinton’s presidential campaign, wanted to prevent Clinton from being tagged by President Bush as a “special-interest captive” by keeping Clinton’s appearances before union groups to a minimum.

Asked about those reports, Kantor said: “They are false. All I want is to expand the party’s traditional coalition of liberals, labor and minorities” that once formed the base of the Democratic Party.

Since unions represent a broad spectrum of the American work force, they can hardly be considered a “special interest” like, say, bankers, doctors, lawyers or the insurance industry.

That doesn’t mean Clinton should ignore any segment of the population, but it would be a mistake to treat labor as an unwelcome guest in his home.

Those who want to restructure the party and blur the support he is getting from labor haven’t stopped Clinton from appearing before union audiences. However, he is not making the kind of all-out appeal he should if he is to win their enthusiastic, unrestrained backing.

He would get that if he were to say, flat out, that he knows organized labor has taken a beating during the Ronald Reagan and Bush Administrations--as it has--and that he wants labor law reform to revive the trade union movement, which now represents nearly 25% fewer workers than it did when Reagan took office in 1980.

Even without that kind of appeal to labor, sophisticated labor leaders and many union members know that Clinton will be much better for workers and unions than either Bush or Ross Perot.

The governor gets warm receptions from union members, as he did last week when he spoke at conventions of two of the nation’s most politically active unions, the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

More significant than his appearances before union audiences is that the “keep-unions-at-a-distance” idea seems to be at odds with Clinton’s record.

Surprisingly to some, as governor of a poor, conservative Southern state with relatively few union members, Clinton usually has been a supporter of most of the goals of labor, and of liberals and minorities. And he reiterates those positions in this campaign.

But little incidents can sometimes give a clearer indication of a candidate’s real feelings about an issue than a lengthy speech.

For instance, Arkansas, unlike most other states, has no law giving public employees the right to unionize. So the governor signed an executive order permitting unions to organize state employees and speak on their behalf if a majority of them voted for representation.

When many state employees seemed hesitant to join, Clinton encouraged them by setting an example. He became a union member himself. He joined AFSCME in 1984. He is still a member today.

Can you imagine a corporate executive doing that in the middle of a union campaign? Other contrasts: Bush makes no secret of his dislike of unions, and Perot fought successfully to keep unions out of Electronic Data Systems, the company that made him a billionaire.

Kantor’s responses weren’t clear to me when I asked him about pleas from union leaders across the country for Clinton to be a more impassioned, open advocate for workers, unions and the causes of liberals and minorities.

“The governor is not an orthodox Democrat,” Kantor replied. “You don’t have to be anti-management to be pro-union. Both labor and management will have a place at the (White House) table. We don’t want division in America. We want to cast a wider net, because we are all in this together.”

That “we-love-everybody” response is too mushy to energize rank-and-file union activists in the Clinton campaign, although he has the endorsement of the 14-million-member AFL-CIO.

Clinton, like Kantor, says he wants to be both pro-union and pro-management, but he puts it differently. He says he wants to reduce labor-management friction, increase cooperation and, like most unions these days, he wants workers to share in the decision-making process.

The governor says that kind of cooperation can be achieved by “eliminating middle layers of management (and) pushing decisions down to the shop floor.”

In an early statement, Clinton said: “We need a whole new organization of work, where workers at the front lines make decisions, not just follow orders, (and that) would radically raise the status of the American worker and tear down the Berlin Wall between labor and management.”

David Sickler, the AFL-CIO Western regional director, urges Clinton to ignore those advisers who want him to appeal to all business and labor together, as if there were no differences.

“Too many of the country’s corporate executives have become incredibly wealthy even as they cut the wages of workers, reduced the number of jobs and slashed their unions. Those differences cannot be ignored,” Sickler said.

Clinton would help himself and would not be pandering to workers or unions if he publicly recognized their needs.

He should make it clear that he knows the answer to the question in that old labor song: “Which side are you on, brother, which side are you on?”