Labor unions are a significant faction in the Democratic Party. Unions represent over ten million working people whom are willing to knock on doors and dial phones for their candidates. These members are willing to contribute, though their unions, millions of dollars to candidates.
Few are willing to acknowledge Labor’s place in progressive politics. Mass media won’t cover labor unless someone is on strike or got indicted. Labor's representatives are often tongue-tied working people who are too angry for a good quote.
But Labor is not dead. Labor is alive and working hard. Every day thousands of union organizers awake before dawn, slug down coffee, kiss their family members good bye, and go out to thanklessly meet skeptical workers and try and convince them to join unions. To my more-than-pleasant surprise, they are doing well.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency, oversees work place elections that determine whether a company’s work force has cast a majority vote for a union. The NLRB’s Election Summary for the period of October 2008 through March, 2009, shows that unions won a staggering 67.1% of those work place elections!
When I was first active in Labor in the early 1980s, unions didn’t even win 50% of those elections. These days unions win 2 out of 3 elections. During those six months, unions won the right to bargain for a contact at companies employing over 29,000 workers. So unions are winning the right to represent about 5000 additional workers every month.
Some notable union election victories: The Teamsters won 12 elections at various locations of First Student, a school bus operation, including elections in the South in Tennessee and Louisiana, and an election for 239 First Student workers in Illinois.
More recently, the Service Employees (SEIU) won an election at Stanford Medical Center for 1431 workers.
And even Southern employers cannot breathe easy, the Bakers Union won an election for 152 workers in Hope, Arkansas.
These election victories are almost insanely glorious, because employers spend billions on carefully crafted anti-union programs to thwart union organizers. Companies retain $500/hour attorneys who dedicate their careers to delaying union elections. If the union wins an election, the attorneys dedicate their time to non-negotiation of a contract, knowing that after a year or two of no visible gains the workers will lose hope.