(By Mark Gruenberg, PAI Staff Writer)

WASHINGTON (PAI) – With the 2010 election campaign down to its final days, the contest – for workers and their allies – has become one of labor’s legions versus corporate cash.

And the unanswered questions in all this are (a) How many unionists will turn out and how enthusiastically, for pro-worker candidates and (b) How much more money, hidden behind front groups, can business and the Radical Right pump into congressional campaigns, bamboozling voters with a blizzard of negative ads?

The stakes in the contest are high. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who would lose that post should the GOP-business onslaught take hold of the House, told the Steelworkers’ Women of Steel conference that the Democratic-run Congress and the Obama administration have a lot of unfinished business.

Headlining it is “jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs,” she said. But it also includes creation of a strategy to revive U.S. manufacturing, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act – to level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining – and enacting “clean energy,” on jobs, anti-global warming and national security grounds.

All those and more pro-worker measures would be in jeopardy or dead if Democrats lost one or both houses of Congress, analysts say. That’s where labor comes in. Pelosi told other progressive groups, whom she blasted for not ponying up campaign cash, that she depends on them for dollars, but on labor for foot soldiers.

That’s not to say that labor is completely staying off the airwaves, unlike the GOP and its business and Radical Right backers. But most of labor’s money – even where one union (SEIU) plans to spend $44 million and another (AFSCME) plans to spend $56 million – will go to mobilizing members and their families, friends and allies.

One of the few unions to announce a large ad buy was the non-affiliated National Education Association, which is spending $15 million on ads for a few selected congressional races where education is a key issue. But a memo from AFL-CIO Political Director Karen Ackerman, distributed to union presidents early in October and released on the Internet last week, outlines the scope of labor’s ground game. She says 75 House Democratic seats are “in play” including 37 with high union density. Her mobilizing report showed:

* Union volunteers have given out 17.5 million leaflets and talked to workers one-on-one at over 4,000 worksites. They made over 23.6 million phone calls and knocked on more than 1.3 million doors. Unions sent out 18.6 million pieces of direct mail through early October. The secretary-treasurer of the West Virginia AFL-CIO says there will be at least eight mailings there.

“Mail is much more effective among union members” than voters overall, Ackerman said. “They see it as a communication from a trusted source, their union, which they want to read. Our testing shows union members spend much more time reading the pieces, and retain more information from them, than the public does.”

* National unions released 2,000 staffers from national and state headquarters – the AFL-CIO building in D.C. is practically empty – to work with 3,000 local coordinators and “support tens of thousands of union volunteers each day who are undertaking this grassroots work” to reach 17 million people, unionists and their household members.

* Two large labor-affiliated groups also put legions in the field. Working America, the fed’s affiliate for people who won’t – or can’t – join unions, “is talking to their 3.2 million members about jobs and the economy, door knocking over 25,000 households a week.” And the Alliance for Retired Americans is reaching its 4 million members by phone banks and town halls “about the dangers we face from Right Wing plans to privatize Social Security.” Both groups also got AFL-CIO direct mail.

Contrast labor’s ground troops with the big business ad blitz, often hidden behind front groups which do not have to disclose their donors. The non-partisan website OpenSecrets.org reports that as of Oct. 19, so-called “independent expenditures” in the off-year election – by all sides – totaled $194.6 million, or almost three times as much as in the 2006 off-year election ($68.8 million).

That figure is undoubtedly low.  With just three unions planning $115 million in spending, and the Chamber of Commerce alone planning to spend an equal sum, total spending on the election could reach into the billions, including spending by candidates and party committees.

Besides the political party committees, the top outside spender as of Oct. 19 was the Chamber ($22.9 million), more than twice the figure of the top union spender (SEIU, at $10.6 million), OpenSecrets reported.

“There are strict legal limits that help make our political efforts transparent,” SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette told a political blogger.

“To the extent we do political work funded by our general treasury, most of it is member-to-member work funded by and accountable to those same low-wage workers. We don’t – and can’t – solicit contributions from non-members. And of course it is disclosed,” Ringuette said.

“The Chamber and the shadowy 527 and (c)4 groups that have sprung up after Citizens United” – the Supreme Court decision which opened the doors for corporate campaign cash –  “are conduits for undisclosed corporate money, pure and simple.” Ringuette says the High Court ruling is “more aptly called ‘Corporations United.”

“We are a union of working people, and the money we spend on politics is money donated by workers. Their (the Chamber’s) attempt to liken us to them in this regard is at best ignorant and frankly wrong,” she declared.