Clinton and Unions Work for Strong Ties : Politics: White House is courting labor for the votes it can provide in Congress. Both sides have kept divisions over NAFTA low-key.

As head of the political arm of the American Federation of Teachers, Rachelle Horowitz is one of the capital’s most politically influential labor officials. But in a Washington career that stretches back through the presidencies of George Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, she had never set foot in the secretary of labor’s office until earlier this year.

“It’s a pretty nice place,” she said. “We’d never been in there before.”

Small things like that make a difference in politics. Despite a potentially bitter division over the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada, President Clinton and organized labor have so far avoided the outright alienation that dogged Carter, the last Democratic President, during his four years in the White House.

In fact, when Clinton appears Monday before the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, White House aides expect a warm welcome. And for Clinton, that welcome still matters.

Organized labor may not wield the clout it once did in presidential politics, but it remains the difference between winning and losing for scores of Democratic members of the House and Senate. As a result, Clinton knows, labor support is indispensable to rounding up votes in Congress for everything from his budget package to health and welfare reform.

Moreover, mindful of how Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) labor-backed challenge made Carter a one-term President, Clinton has been careful to avoid alienating the one organized group in the Democratic coalition that remains large and politically sophisticated enough to provide a base for an internal revolt.

In courting labor, Clinton began with a somewhat shaky base. Most labor leaders initially supported other candidates in last year’s Democratic primary campaigns, concerned that Clinton--then the governor of a Southern state with relatively little union presence--would be too conservative.

Clinton’s labor base lay initially with the large white-collar unions, primarily those representing teachers and government workers. Union leaders such as Gerald W. McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and Albert Shanker of the AFT continue to be among his strongest backers on the AFL-CIO’s executive council.

By contrast, union leaders such as Jack Sheinkman of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, Owen Bieber of the United Auto Workers and William H. Bywater of the International Union of Electrical Workers have been more skeptical of Clinton, worried about his ties to the conservative Democratic Leadership Council and his support for NAFTA.

Earlier this year, as the Administration seemed to have trouble figuring out how to make the White House machinery work, union skeptics began to worry that “this wasn’t going to work, and we’re never going to have a Democratic President again,” said Victor Kamber, a political consultant with close labor ties. But more recently, as the White House has begun to get back on course, that criticism has abated.

Clinton’s health care proposal has been a major item in keeping labor happy. National health care has been a top priority for the labor movement for half a century.

Moreover, the Clinton plan has been structured in a way that delivers disproportionate benefits to large, heavily unionized, traditional manufacturing industries, particularly automobile manufacturers. By providing a substantial financial boost to those companies, Clinton’s plan would open the way for their workers to receive wage increases or other new benefits.

Union officials have also cheered Clinton’s proposals in other areas ranging from family-leave legislation to the Administration’s proposals for greater federal spending on worker training.

In addition, Clinton has been careful to place people with close labor ties in senior positions scattered throughout his Administration. Both the director and the No. 2 person in the White House political office, for example, formerly worked for unions, as did key officials in the Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education departments.

So far, Clinton’s cultivation of labor has paid off. Unlike other activist portions of the Democratic coalition--civil rights and environmental groups, for example--organized labor has made a major effort to keep its differences with the Administration quiet.

“The 12 years between Carter and Clinton have been devastating years for working people and their unions,” said United Steelworkers President Lynn R. Williams. “There is a very definite sense that whatever difficulties may come up, this is an infinitely better circumstance than we had.”

So far, the NAFTA battle has not created the sort of deep fissure that some Administration officials had feared.

“It puts a strain on the relationship, but not a break. There’s a difference,” Sheinkman said.

“We’ve had roaring good arguments, but NAFTA hasn’t sloshed over into any of these other areas, and they are very conscious of not having it do so,” said one senior Administration official.

Union officials, focusing their complaints on NAFTA’s business backers, seldom directly mention Clinton in their public statements opposing the trade agreement.

And Clinton’s aides have been “careful to focus attention on Ross Perot as the big adversary (on NAFTA), although we know labor sways many more votes,” a White House official said. Administration planners have tried hard to avoid “creating a rupture” on the issue, the official said.

Moreover, Williams said, “(Clinton) made his views and sympathies quite clear in the election campaign. We’re not angry in the sense that we would be if he were doing something he said he wouldn’t.”

The Administration’s own weaknesses--it seems to be losing the battle for NAFTA, for example--have also minimized strains between Clinton and labor. “It’s easy for labor people to be magnanimous if they’re winning,” Horowitz said.

All that could change. “If we lose the NAFTA fight and the Administration has really turned on the heat and people see the Administration as the guilty party, that’s going to create problems,” Sheinkman said. “Any plant that closes, if NAFTA passes, irrespective of the reasons why it closed, the Administration and NAFTA will be the tar babies, merits or not.”

Even if labor defeats NAFTA, other points of tension will remain. Unions, for example, have pushed hard for legislation that would prohibit companies from permanently replacing workers who go on strike. Although Clinton has endorsed the striker-replacement bill, the legislation has been bottled up in the Senate, where enough conservative Democrats have joined Republicans to keep it from coming to a vote. Clinton’s unwillingness to lean on Democratic senators to move the bill has irritated some union officials.

Another potential problem could develop around the minimum wage, where officials in the Treasury Department and the White House’s National Economic Council have raised doubts about Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich’s proposal to raise the wage floor. Unions have consistently pushed for increases.

Even Clinton supporters admit that the labor rank-and-file is, in many cases, more critical of Clinton than its leadership is.

Polls conducted by several unions indicate that Clinton’s popularity among union members generally tracks his popularity among Americans as a whole, said Kamber. Unions with large percentages of women and minorities among their memberships--service employees, for example--give Clinton relatively strong support.

Unions with a larger percentage of white men--the Teamsters and building trades unions, for example--have found more skepticism of Clinton and substantially more support for Perot among their members.