Hillary doing well with 'really macho' unions
They say they're also impressed by Obama but don't know him as well
Vince Panvini has been the political director of the Sheet Metal Workers International Association for 14 years, and he has seen a lot of Democratic and Republican candidates come and go.
In 2004, he was hoping Dick Gephardt, the congressman from Missouri, would win the Democratic nomination, but Panvini's union was split: some members supported former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean; others liked Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. So they didn't endorse until Gephardt pulled out after the Iowa caucuses, choosing to unite behind Kerry.
This time there is no split, and likely before the end of the year, they will formally endorse Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). The members were polled about the candidates, and Clinton was the favorite, 2-1, Panvini said. "Our guys are really macho, but it's amazing how they flock to her. They love her."
In the race for union support, Clinton and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards seem the big winners, but labor leaders say they are impressed with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama -- they just don't know him as well.
Some of the umbrella organizations such as the AFL-CIO and Change to Win or the large internationals, such as Service Employees International Union (SEIU), haven't thrown their weight behind a candidate, but unions or regional councils within those organizations have made endorsements.
For instance, SEIU state councils in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas endorse Obama, while the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers is behind Clinton, and the 1.2 million-member United Steelworkers and the huge SEIU California council are behind Edwards.
It may be that union membership is on the decline -- only 12 percent of the American population belongs to a union -- but organized labor still has tremendous political influence. "Unions may have slipped at the bargaining table, but their importance has grown in the political arena," says Harley Shaiken, a professor at University of California-Berkeley who follows the labor movement.
"That is the paradox of labor today. Union families make up 25 percent of voters. They carry a huge wallop in an election, but they are more important in a primary because they are the heart of the Democratic base, and they know how to turn people out to participate in the caucuses and primaries."
And in some states, such as Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania, there is high union density.
Unions are very demanding of the candidates, expecting them to support legislation that is labor friendly, such as the Employment Free Choice Act that will make it easier to join a union. And if union brass wants you to turn up at a function, you'd better do it.
Obama's failure to attend an endorsement meeting for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers rankled the union's leaders.
"We pushed hard to get every candidate to participate," says Richard Sloan, the union's director of communications. "The prerequisite was that you had to appear before our executive [council] in Florida.
"Obama's people said there was a scheduling conflict, but the other people turned themselves into pretzels to get here." Ultimately, the machinists endorsed Clinton for the Democratic race and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for the Republicans.
Shaiken believes if Obama fails to win big union support it is because his message is "a bit more diffuse than Clinton's or Edwards'. It's the message of hope, and while union members may like that, while they may see it as charismatic, they want something more focused.
"It's not that unions dislike him. It's just that the competition is pretty intense."