Pressure Is On for Iowa Union Voters to Pick Gore

On caucus night they will enter in their union jackets--shimmering blue satin for the electricians, green for the government employees, purple for the service workers.

Their leaders have told them Al Gore is their man. When the time comes to vote, a union precinct captain will call out “All the Gore people over here!” There will be no secret ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday night. Everyone will know if someone breaks ranks and supports Bill Bradley.

“Think of how unions place pressure on strike breakers,” said Cary Covington, a University of Iowa political science professor who has seen labor’s influence at his own Iowa City precinct. “There’s a social dynamic at work that encourages conformity.”

The unique nature of the caucuses--part political meeting, part neighborhood block party--works to the strength of grass-roots organizations such as the labor movement in Iowa, where nearly every union has officially declared its support for the vice president.

Since October, when the AFL-CIO endorsed Gore at its national convention in Los Angeles, Iowa unions have provided a small army of organizers to the Gore cause. They are a valuable commodity in a state where only about 10% of registered voters typically participate in the evening caucuses.

“This is where union support is the most important in the entire election,” said veteran Democratic consultant Jim Margolis. “This is a caucus state and it’s all about organizing and turnout. You’re trying to get a small, targeted group of people out in the middle of winter.”

With just a few days to go until the gatherings are held, hundreds of union members across the state are staffing phone banks in union halls and private homes. The state labor federation and national AFL-CIO have kicked in the money for five pro-Gore mailers to 50,000 union members, including a final one scheduled to reach voters Saturday.

On Monday, when voting gets underway in public meetings at more than 2,100 cafeterias, school libraries and other meeting places across the state, labor will have pro-Gore precinct captains at most of them, the equivalent of having a union organizer inside the voting booth.

That influence is not lost on the Bradley campaign. “We do not underestimate the pressure on rank-and-file members to support Al Gore,” said Jim Farrell, Bradley’s Iowa spokesman. “However, we are counting on the courage of individual members who are publicly standing with Bill Bradley.”

Gore spokesman Jud Lounsbury said he doubts most union voters will feel obliged to follow their leaders blindly. “Iowans are renowned for their independence,” he said. “They’ll vote their conscience.”

Beyond the position taken by Iowa’s labor hierarchy, a recent voter survey makes it clear that Gore’s support among union members runs deep here. A Los Angeles Times poll this week found Gore holding a 23-point lead over Bradley in the Iowa caucuses and favored by 34 points (63% to 29%) among union households likely to vote in the Democratic caucuses.

In all, Iowa has 166,000 union members, about 13% of the state’s work force.

Veteran labor activists say they see Gore as a longtime friend of unions who has championed their causes in the past and who has promised to embrace key elements of their agenda in the future. Among other things, Gore has pledged to increase the minimum wage and beef up funding for OSHA and the National Labor Relations Board, which monitors fair treatment of workers in union organizing campaigns.

Those positions were enough to overcome a strong antipathy toward Gore due to his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. But the vice president was also helped by the fact that NAFTA is supported by all of the other major presidential candidates too--including Bradley and the Republicans.

“There isn’t anyone in the field who has the right position on NAFTA,” said Mark Smith, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor.

Union members here blame the treaty for the flight of thousands of manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

At the John Deere plant in Waterloo, three quarters of the union work force has been eliminated since the 1970s, said Bill Dotzler, a state representative who is also a union member and worker at the factory.

“We didn’t see eye to eye with the vice president on trade issues,” said Dotzler. Nevertheless, the Iowa branch of Dotzler’s union, the United Auto Workers, endorsed Gore. They did so in defiance of officials at the UAW’s Detroit headquarters, who wanted to keep the union neutral.

Gore has tried to soothe labor’s trade concerns with broad promises to seek environmental protections and prohibitions against child labor in future treaties.

The vice president has worked to bolster his union support with large rallies in blue-collar towns such as Waterloo and Sioux City. Recently, Gore joined a group of striking Teamsters on the picket line in Cedar Rapids. And long before the first snow fell, Gore was grand marshal in Des Moines’ Labor Day parade.

Bill Carrick, a California Democratic consultant who ran the labor-backed presidential campaign of Richard A. Gephardt in 1988, said union backing is critical to Gore. “They are extremely well organized for this whole process,” he said of the unions. “They sort of live for this.”

Carrick said he believes Bradley will run close to Gore in nonunion households but that the vice president’s strong support among union members will prove decisive. “It’s hard to imagine a successful campaign [in Iowa] without union support,” he said. “Getting that support is a big deal.”

Even though Gore has a sizable lead, his labor supporters are not taking any chances.

On Saturday, the state labor federation will hold a “precinct caucus school” in Des Moines to educate organizers on the intricacies of the process. Each caucus will involve a public meeting--usually lasting at least two hours--that will climax when voters divide into groups to support candidates.

On Monday night in Cedar Rapids, electrician Bob Houlahan will don his blue International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers jacket and walk to the caucus meeting room where he will be a precinct captain. He expects about 30 of his brothers and sisters in the labor movement to do the same. As a group, they should make up about a third of the voters in the Democratic precinct, he said.

“We encourage people to wear their union attire,” he said. “But we try to be as low-key as we can. We try not to sound like big labor bullies. That turns people off.”

Many unions here supported Gephardt during his 1988 campaign, have backed gubernatorial candidates and worked to make labor’s presence felt on myriad local issues.

Two unions, representing a small fraction of the Iowa labor movement, have endorsed Bradley: a painters union in Des Moines and the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America Local 893.

Bradley spokesman Ferrell said the former senator from New Jersey also has the “quiet” endorsement of several “renegade locals,” though he declined to be more specific. “I don’t want to get them in trouble.”

Like Gore, Bradley joined the striking Teamsters on their picket line. And last month, he held his largest labor rally, a gathering of 500 people at the Teamsters Hall in Cedar Rapids. At one point, Bradley led the crowd in a chant of his campaign motto: “It can happen!”

Jim Beatty, a 38-year-old mail carrier, was among those present who said they would vote for Bradley, despite the urgings of the state’s union leadership. “I’m an individual. I’ll do my own thing. Yes, I support labor, but I’m not going to have them say you’ve got to support this Democrat or that Republican.”

Times staff writer Matea Gold contributed to this report.

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