Unions Talk Race as Election Nears

Labor leaders who want desperately to chase the Republicans from the White House are confronting a hurdle in their outreach to members: the question of race. Obama's record on economic issues, they say, should put him way ahead of John McCain with working-class voters. But will the facts be enough to overcome some members' deep-seated prejudice?

"We have people disguise it by saying he doesn't have enough experience, or they're not comfortable voting for him," says Kyle McDermott, field director in the Steelworkers' political department. "And we have people come at us and say, 'Look, I'm not going to vote for a black person.' They don't use as kind words as I just did."

Henry Nicholas, a vice president in the public employees union AFSCME, tells of a white member at a Philadelphia hospital who a few weeks ago hung a noose up at work. (He was fired.)

"There's nobody in America," he says, "who, when they have their thinking caps on, believes that racism has disappeared. This [election] is an opportunity to overcome it and deal with it. It won't disappear unless we work on getting rid of it."

The Union Vote Matters

Union households were 24 percent of the electorate in 2004. That year, as in 1996 and 2000, union-household voters went 59 percent for the Democrat. AFL-CIO says 65 percent of union members casting a ballot chose John Kerry over George Bush.

After years of all-out effort, with hundreds of millions of dollars and untold staff time poured into campaigning, it might be hard to be believe that only 59 percent of voters in union households members pull the lever for a Democrat.

In 2000 and 2004, that wasn't enough. Winning union voters and their families by an even larger margin is crucial to Obama's chances to win the presidency this year. Pat Gillespie, president of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, says, "You'd think it would be a 70-30 split, but it's almost even, and the only reason I can attribute it to is the color of his skin."

And in a special edition of his union's newsletter, John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), bemoaned polls that show union members too close to splitting their votes down the middle.

"Why then is it close?" Gage asked. "Many, including me, think race. Union leaders have felt the sting of anonymous e-mails and coded language at union meetings."

What Tack to Take?

A September 8-10 national poll of likely voters by Democracy Corps found that in white union households, Obama gets 44 percent of the vote, 8 points below the local Democratic candidate for Congress and 9 points below the number of those who identify as Democrats. In 2004 white union households backed John Kerry by a 52.4 percent margin.

At the August meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council, talk was unusually frank about the need to deal with the race question. But what to do?

Jeff Crosby, head of a central labor council near Boston, says, "There's two approaches -- one is just to talk about the class issues, not race. The other is more complicated: let's talk about race.

"In any legislative campaign we have this issue. It's the one moment people are actually willing to talk. Do you try to do education in that teachable moment? Or do you just try to get the vote?"

Most unions are trying to get the vote by any means necessary, but some see this election as part of unions' responsibility to challenge racism, whether it's in the voting booth or in the shop.

"You've got to break down all of those barriers that stop us from respecting the guy we work next to," said Donna Dewitt, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO.

Speaking to the Steelworkers convention in July, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka said, "There's no evil that's inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism -- and it's something we in the labor movement have a special responsibility to challenge."