Bush Oil Victory Helped by Unlikely Ally

As President Bush savors his come-from-behind victory on Arctic oil exploration, he can thank organized labor for helping him get the job done.

No group fought harder to keep Bush out of the White House than labor. But when the administration needed help to win House approval of Bush’s Arctic drilling plan, it was union muscle--flexed on the promise of union jobs--that made the difference, according to congressional insiders.

When the House voted, 223 to 206, late Wednesday to allow exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, at least a dozen Democrats who normally side with environmentalists defected to the president’s camp. Their votes were won by lobbyists for the Teamsters Union and the building trades division of the AFL-CIO, House colleagues and others said.

“It’s an irony that on [this] victory, it is labor that put him over the top in the House,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), sponsor of a defeated amendment that would have made the refuge off-limits to drilling rigs. “If labor hadn’t weighed in, the environment would have won.”

Labor’s support of the Arctic drilling plan was clinched by a little-noticed provision of the 510-page House energy bill that says union workers will get all jobs associated with exploration and production at the refuge.

The Arctic drilling initiative has divided two powerful political constituencies that work together on many issues. Labor officials estimate that development of oil reserves in the refuge could generate as many as 25,000 jobs for union members in Alaska and indirectly support more than 700,000 jobs around the country. Environmentalists say it will damage a fragile ecosystem, endangering Porcupine River caribou and other species that traverse the frozen tundra.

Rep. Robert A. Brady (D-Pa.), a third-term lawmaker from a working-class district who carries two union cards, is one of the Democrats who was convinced by labor lobbyists to vote for Bush’s Arctic drilling plan.

“The unions made the argument that it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country,” said Stanley White, Brady’s chief of staff. “When they speak, their voice carries a lot of weight with Bob Brady. The union put his kids through school and fed his family. He’s a union guy.”

Brady is also an environment guy, so the choice was not an easy one, White said.

“He has a very good environmental record too. This is one case where two sides that are friends of his were in conflict,” White said. “One way or another, he was going to vote against the position of one of his friends.”

Drilling opponents expressed hope that labor would not be able to persuade the Senate to go along with the House. Several Senate Republicans are on record as opposing Arctic drilling, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has promised a filibuster over the issue, which means it would take 60 votes in the 100-member Senate to assure passage.

“We can create millions more jobs cleaning the environment and developing clean energy technologies than we can polluting and destroying one of the last pristine places on the face of the Earth,” Kerry said.

But labor officials weren’t about to throw in the towel Thursday.

“I don’t think it’s dead on arrival in the Senate,” said Jerry Hood, a Teamsters official from Alaska who headed the union’s lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill. “I don’t even think it’s on life support.”

Hood, who said he has had about 250 meetings with lawmakers since March, offered a not-so-subtle reminder to ambitious Senate Democrats that their union support in future campaigns could depend on how they vote on Arctic drilling.

Representatives of the business community, elated by the unexpected House victory, were beginning to believe it could happen again in the Senate.

“We are very close to having a majority in the Senate,” said William Kovacs, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “We’ll fight to get ANWR in.”

To gain labor support, Republicans and business interests accepted a union-backed provision that they normally would have rejected out of hand. As a condition of each oil and gas lease offered in the refuge, oil companies and their agents and contractors must agree to hire union workers.

“We knew that at the end of the day we were going to have to cooperate with labor,” Kovacs said.

There was agreement among business interests that “national energy policy is so vital to the country that we had to be reasonable, we had to be bipartisan and we had to stay the course,” Kovacs said.

Democratic congressional staffers said the unions hoped to set a precedent so provisions requiring union workers would be inserted in future measures governing oil and gas leasing on federal land.

Democratic staffers suggested that the Arctic measure also provided the Teamsters with an opportunity to show they had an “in” with the new administration, despite labor’s determined efforts last year to elect Bush’s Democratic opponent, Al Gore.

At the same time the Teamsters were helping the administration score a major victory on energy policy in the House, the union was fighting in the Senate to scuttle a White House plan to give Mexican truckers full access to U.S. roads beginning next January. The union prevailed when the Senate voted to require Mexican truckers to undergo stringent safety reviews that the administration contends will delay their entry by a year or more.

Labor contributed more than $78 million to Democrats in 2000 and less than $5 million to Republicans.

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), a leading proponent of drilling in the Arctic refuge, was a Teamster as a teenager, when he worked at a peach cannery in Sutter City, Calif. Young helped build support for the provision to fill Arctic drilling jobs with union workers.

“They really tightened the screws in the last couple of weeks,” said Gail Graves, government relations associate of Defenders of Wildlife, referring to the labor lobbying effort. Graves said environmentalists will take nothing for granted when the issue comes up in the Senate, perhaps as early as September.

Environmentalists expressed anger Thursday with labor unions that support drilling in the refuge. But union officials offered no apologies.

“We have to balance the interests of our members as workers, consumers and citizens who want to help the environment,” said Bill Samuel, legislative director for the AFL-CIO. “We have sometimes a more difficult balancing act. Protecting jobs and promoting economic growth is a very important priority for us.”

Although the number of jobs that would be created by exploration in the Arctic refuge is hotly disputed, drilling advocates told lawmakers the effects would be widespread. “We took those economic and job arguments to every member we saw,” said Hood. Proponents recruited local union leaders to help apply political pressure.

Going into the vote, officials on both sides of the aisle had expected Arctic drilling to be stripped from the energy bill. But Markey said he knew it would be “a very hard struggle” after the Teamsters went to the White House this winter to consult with Bush about his energy plan.

In fact, he expressed gratification that his amendment to bar drilling in the refuge managed to attract 206 votes, considering the powerful coalition aligned against it: the White House, the House Republican leadership, oil and gas interests, and organized labor.

“You just don’t see a coalition like that every day,” he said.

Kovacs agreed that labor was responsible for delivering key swing votes. “Labor supplied the additional votes. They need to be given credit for their help.”

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Unlikely Union: Labor, no big Bush supporter, helped get backing for his Arctic drilling plan. A19