By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

If you live in Michigan and you haven't received a communication from your union, urging you to vote for Barack Obama for president - you're probably gonna.

"The Building Trades Department and each of its affiliated unions are mounting an all-out effort to educate and mobilize an unprecedented number of our members during this election cycle," said Building Trades Department President Mark Ayers, in a Sept. 9 update sent to union leaders around the nation.

Ayers continued: "In the most recent AFL-CIO tracking polls (conducted in late August and early September) for the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Senator Obama leads Senator McCain among building trades members by a margin of 55-30. More importantly, this advantage has been achieved without the benefit of intensive member-to-member communication - e.g. letters from local business agents to rank and file members; jobsite flyer distribution, or phone calls and house visits.

"So, our task for the next eight weeks is clear cut - mobilize our local networks of business agents and business managers to personally contact each and every one of their members through letters, phone calls, jobsite leafleting and home visits. And not just once, but several times."

With Michigan designated as one of the four major swing states this election cycle, building trades workers aren't the only union members targeted for special attention this year.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney announced that more than one million mailers were sent to undecided union voters in those four swing states to introduce them to Obama. The mailers tied in with labor walks in 100 cities nationwide on Sept. 4, the day McCain accepted the Republican nomination. The walkers also discussed McCain's anti-worker policies, now and in the past.

"We need to work our butts off between now and November," said Anna Burger, chair of the rival labor federation, Change To Win. "We need to elect Obama so that we have a nation that works for all of us."

AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman said the combined labor movement, using hundreds "of thousands of union volunteers talking directly to undecided union voters, will: Knock on 10 million doors; mail to 25 million voters; make 70 million phone calls; distribute 20 million leaflets at work sites, and send out over 4 million e-mails and text messages.

All told, the AFL-CIO plans to spend $53 million on political action this year, a record.

"With more than 13 million union members and family members, the AFL-CIO talks directly to more voters than nearly any organization outside of the presidential campaigns and the national political parties," the Wall Street Journal said in an article during this year's primaries. "Though union membership is down nationwide, the union share of the electorate is growing and is particularly strong on battleground states such as Ohio, where the last few presidential election have been decided."
(PAI and the St. Louis Labor Tribune contributed to this report).