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As union membership drops toward 10 percent 'We will not have the strength to come back'

Date Posted: September 3 2004

Mark Gaffney is president of the Michigan AFL-CIO. He spoke to Michigan Building Trades delegates on Aug. 24.

“The problem President Bush,” Gaffney said, “is he is the most dangerous president for the labor movement that we may have ever seen.”

The other problem according to Gaffney: “Our members ought to understand that by now. With all the job losses, the rotten economy, and all of your members who have struggled to find work. Of course a lot of members get this.

“About half of them get it right away, maybe even 60 percent get it and will vote for John Kerry. But we all know that maybe 25 percent of union members are going to vote for George Bush anyway, because of abortion, because of guns, or for whatever other reason that we don’t fully understand.

“So there is about 60 percent of our members who do get it, and will vote for Kerry. About 25 percent will vote for Bush. That leaves 15 percent. George Bush knows that he doesn’t need to get a majority of your members to win Michigan. He knows he only needs to win that 15 percent. That’s where the fight is.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent in Michigan and around the country by both Democrats and Republicans to win the vote of that small sliver of voters, Gaffney said.

“It’s almost silly,” he said. “We’re all spending hundreds of millions to reach only 15-20 percent of the electorate. The reality is there are 14 battleground states, and Michigan is one of them. We are perhaps one of the three most important battleground states in the nation.”

Gaffney said Kerry can lose other top battlegrounds states like Florida and Ohio and still win the election. “But under no scenario can he lose Michigan and still win the nation,” he said. “And that’s why George Bush is spending so much time in Michigan.”

Polling – which is getting more and more extensive – is showing that Kerry is receiving much more support among union members than with their household spouses and voting-age children.

Gaffney said to counter this trend, one of the major tactics being undertaken by organized labor is person to person contact: knocking on the doors of targeted swing-voting union members. Not a popular process with the knocker or knockee, but it’s an effective tactic nonetheless.

“The best way to approach union members is to knock on the door,” he said. “So these walks are critical to address that falloff in the households.”

Why is organized labor spending all this time, money and wearing out soles of shoes during this election? Gaffney said it’s simple: the ability of labor unions to represent the interests of working Americans is at stake. All the things union members hold dear, good health care, pensions for a good retirement and a voice in workplace conditions are all slowly going away, but the process has been advanced by the Bush Administration.

“I’ve always said that if the percentage of union membership in the American workforce drops below 10 percent, we’re done,” Gaffney said. “We will not have the strength to come back. From that point forward we will just be riding out the demise of the labor movement.

“At this point we’re at 13.5 percent. We’re getting dangerously close to 10 percent and George Bush and his gang knows it. If they can put that last couple of nails in our coffin it will be the end of us as far as being a political power.

“That’s the goal of this administration, to make it so that your children and grandchildren do not have the option to work as union workers.”