Union Membership Targeted

California’s labor leaders, who have pledged an all-out effort to defeat the Oct. 7 recall vote against Gov. Gray Davis, aren’t asking union members to love their current governor.

Instead, they are warning their 2.6 million members that what is at stake is not just Davis’ job, but their own.

Their campaign, which includes a $5-million get-out-the-vote effort, focuses on workplace issues that they believe will bring their members to the polls. It is a message sure to be delivered today at the annual Labor Day parade in Wilmington and at events opposing the recall campaign that are planned for downtown Los Angeles, Alameda and other union strongholds throughout the state.

They stress specifics such as California’s rules on overtime, which are more generous than such regulations elsewhere in the country; enforcement of workplace safety rules; and policies governing how much people with state contracts must pay their workers. On each of those, Davis has changed Republican policies that union leaders said had hurt their members.

And in keeping with an overall Democratic strategy, they are trying to make former Gov. Pete Wilson a target of the campaign. Union leaders fought repeatedly with Wilson, a Republican, when he was governor and are now eager to stress his ties to Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

One widely distributed flier shows Wilson’s face pasted onto Schwarzenegger’s muscled body. “I’m Back!” it warns, going on to list pro-labor policies that union leaders say Wilson “terminated” or at least attempted to end. “This time I’ll finish the job!” the Wilson character on the flier warns.

The approach appears to have struck a chord with at least some union members. “How upset am I about what’s going on?” asked Tom Lickfelt, 60, a longtime member of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 11. “I live in Florida now, and I made sure I came back to help get out the vote. I’m here for the duration.”

Union organizers say the key to defeating the recall effort will be tapping into the sentiments of rank-and-file members like Lickfelt.

“We are saying that it’s a horrible manipulation of the process, that the people behind it are anti-worker,” said John Perez of the United Food and Commercial Workers. “Our members understand that it’s nothing more than a power grab by right-wingers.”

Through phone calls -- 3 million of which are planned -- and tens of thousands of job site fliers, direct mailings, precinct walks and one-on-one conversations, union officials hope to portray the recall campaign as damaging to their members’ pocketbooks.

“We have to talk to them about their jobs,” said Jerry Vaughn, political director of Service Employees International Union Local 660. “We have to talk about exactly what’s at stake here.”

The issues involved have been points of contention between unions and employer groups for a decade.

One involves California’s eight-hour day rule. Most states and the federal government require overtime to be paid to hourly workers after 40 hours worked in a week. California, by contrast, since 1918 has required overtime to be paid after eight hours in a day.

During the 1990s, business groups argued that the rule had become outdated and failed to give companies the flexibility they needed to compete. After several years of lobbying by business, a commission appointed by Wilson eliminated the rule in 1997. Two years later, Davis signed legislation putting the eight-hour rule back into effect for about 8 million workers.

A second pay-related issue involves government contracts. State rules require that companies that do work for the government -- building roads, for example -- must pay “prevailing wages.” The rule is designed to prevent companies that do not have unions from getting contracts by being able to bid less than unionized companies.

Wilson sought to change the definition of prevailing wages to allow contractors to pay workers less. He argued that the prevailing-wage law was inflating the cost of construction and harming the state budget. Davis, by contrast, signed legislation backed by unions that expanded the prevailing-wage requirements.

And on workplace safety, union leaders insist that Republican administrations went easy on businesses that failed to abide by regulations. Under Davis, enforcement has been more vigorous, they say.

“This is very much a political fight,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. “I think that the conflict is pretty open. Pete Wilson clearly saw unions as a threat to his agenda and the Republican Party, and he worked hard to diminish that strength.”

But John Duncan, who served as Wilson’s last director of the Department of Industrial Relations, the state agency that oversees labor conditions, said Wilson’s record had been distorted by union leaders.

“I think there’s somewhat of a desperate strategy going on right now,” Duncan said. “There is a balance to the things they point to in a completely exaggerated fashion.”

On the eight-hour workday, Duncan said, Wilson was trying to give businesses and employers more flexibility. On prevailing wages, “all Wilson wanted to do was to go from the top union wage to a weighted average. Most other states in the country operated by this rule,” he said.

On safety, Duncan said state labor officials under Wilson had conducted high-profile raids on the garment industry, enforced minimum standards and taken a “balanced approach” to job site safety.

Duncan said he was “not surprised there is a demonization going on. The organizers of the AFL-CIO have had pretty strong reign for the last five years. But we now have a huge deficit and some laws on the books that are causing businesses to relocate outside of California. Those are real issues.”

Many union members agree that those issues are real, but they see them very differently. What Duncan and others see as needed forms of flexibility, they see as rollbacks of hard-won protections.

Recently, at the headquarters of IBEW Local 11 in Pasadena, electrical workers gathered to train for the anti-recall effort said they had no doubt their lot had improved under a Democratic administration.

Robert Darcy, of Arcadia, a 10-year member, said his main concern was safety.

“I’m not looking for a big paycheck. I’m just looking to go home safely every night,” he said. “A lot of people will take shortcuts to save money. I’ve seen it for years.”

“It isn’t always necessary to get laws off the books. All they have to do is stop enforcing those laws,” said Kevin Norton, who worked his way up the ranks to become the local union’s political director three years ago. “We’ve seen it before,” he added.

What really irritates Norton, however, is the suggestion by Republicans that labor-backed rules eliminate jobs.

“If you want to talk about job killers, then talk about NAFTA, GATT -- all those trade agreements that sent jobs overseas,” he said. Republicans “don’t want to enforce any labor laws. They don’t want overtime,” he said.

“If the working stiff gets the bad rap because we want to live in our own house, own a car, have our kids go to decent schools, there’s something wrong with the picture,” he added. “That’s not asking too much; that’s the American dream.”

Such sentiments are likely to be heard a lot in the five weeks remaining before the election.

Backers of the recall effort point out that union members were among the 1.6 million people statewide who signed petitions to force the matter onto the ballot. Union organizers concede that they have work to do convincing their members about the recall issues as they see them.

They have done so before with the clock ticking.

In 1998, union leaders were able to reverse the trend on Proposition 226, a Wilson-backed initiative that would have required unions to get yearly permission from members before deducting union dues from paychecks.

Just months before the vote, polls showed that nearly 7 in 10 voters from union households supported the proposal, about the same ratio as for voters in general. A massive campaign by organized labor, focused against the people behind the initiative, turned the vote. The “no” side won with 53%.

To achieve that sort of result, “you have to fire up your base,” said Bill Whalen, who wrote speeches for Wilson and now shares an office with him at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

For unions, that means talking about an “anti-labor agenda” by the other side. “You have to find ways to get people passionate,” he said, “to get them mad enough to go out of their way to vote.”