UPS Strike Gives Labor Unions a Leg Up on Capitol Hill

“From now on, ask not what labor can do for Democrats,” says liberal labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein. “The question now is, what can Democrats do for labor.”

Allowing for a touch of bravado in this assessment, liberal analysts and labor strategists view this week’s outcome of the UPS strike as an important symbolic victory for unions whose significance will extend beyond the bargaining table to the voting booth and Capitol Hill cloakrooms.

In these quarters, the settlement won by the Teamsters union is seen as opening the way for unions and their liberal allies to expand their influence on controversial legislation--notably in this fall’s anticipated battle over expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement--as well as in the Democratic presidential campaign in 2000.

No one pretends that labor’s drive to reassert itself as a major political force after years of dwindling influence will be easy. Trade unions now represent less than 15% of the national work force, down from 35% during labor’s heyday in the 1950s. The nature of today’s economy, with its shift away from manufacturing to service industries and its reliance on part-time workers, remains as an inherent obstacle to labor chieftains.

“It’s one thing to have a victory,” said Ruy Teixeira, a political analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington. “But it’s another thing to translate that into organizing and political clout.”

Nevertheless, those on the left who previously counted on a politically potent union movement as the engine for achieving liberal objectives understandably viewed the boost labor received from the UPS accord as a welcome contrast with recent trends.

“Labor has been a cipher, and a nonplayer for years,” said Lichtenstein, a University of Virginia faculty member who last year helped organize a national effort to rebuild the once-formidable alliance between trade union leaders and liberal intellectuals. “And the victory in the strike is important not just because [Teamster members] got more wages, but because they hung together and they got public support. That hasn’t happened in 25 years.”

The first test of what labor hopes will be its enhanced political muscle will probably come this fall in Congress, where labor and President Clinton are expected to clash over the administration’s push to expedite expansion of NAFTA in Latin America.

“I’d much rather be going into the NAFTA fight having won [the UPS strike] than having lost,” said David Smith, public policy director for the AFL-CIO. The terms of the UPS contract “reinforce the impression that labor is a serious player and that we play hard.”

Of particular consequence, many believe, is that the Teamsters, flushed with its success on the picket lines against UPS, is being counted on to play a major part in the NAFTA battle.

“The Teamsters have always been a sleeping giant,” said Mark Gersh, director of the National Committee for an Effective Congress, a liberal political action committee, reflecting on the union’s previous tendency to become sidetracked by corruption problems. “Now, with [union president] Ron Carey in charge, they are using their resources to be in the vanguard of change in the labor movement. The fact that the strike probably strengthened Carey’s hand may be its most important result.”

Looking ahead to the Democratic presidential contest, party pollster Mark Mellman said: “I think the labor endorsement would be all the more coveted as a result of the UPS settlement.”

But labor’s effort to exert its influence on the contest will present it with a challenge.

Vice President Al Gore, the odds-on favorite for the nomination, has been striving to keep union leaders from throwing all their weight behind his most serious potential rival, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who has long championed labor’s causes.

The dilemma that labor may ultimately face, Gersh notes, is whether to throw its weight behind the candidate whose views most closely match their own positions or the one most likely to win.