After Years in Hibernation, Resurgent Labor Movement Has GOP Worried

WASHINGTON —  Big Labor is back.

With a tough-talking Irishman from the Bronx, John Sweeney, as its new president, the 13-million-member AFL-CIO has reemerged as a potentially powerful political force, winning new respect and even fear among its foes in Congress and the business world.

Organized labor supplied the workers and cash that helped a Democrat win a close Senate race in Oregon earlier this year. Now it is running hard-hitting radio ads that have helped muscle moderate Republicans into backing proposals to increase the minimum wage.

And most frightening of all to GOP leaders and parts of the business community, the AFL-CIO imposed a special assessment on each member to raise an unprecedented $35 million to pour into key congressional races.

Labor on the offensive is a major change after a decade of indifference or even worse, an era when labor’s endorsement could do as much harm as good for a candidate.

“This is a different labor movement; it has a new voice and a louder voice,” said Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and head of the AFL-CIO leadership unit directing the political drive.

Sweeney has given the labor federation “new, more aggressive, more partisan leadership,” said David Mason, an analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation. Labor wasn’t “playing this way before,” he added.

Business, alarmed by labor’s resurgence, has established a “coalition of coalitions” to mount a counteroffensive. Organizations ranging from the National Assn. of Manufacturers, with its giant corporate members, to the National Federation of Independent Business, whose 600,000 members have an average work force of fewer than 10, are looking for ways to preserve the first GOP-controlled Congress in 50 years.

Leading the coalition is R. Bruce Josten, director of membership policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The AFL-CIO’s $35-million political fund, in Josten’s view, shows that Sweeney “wants to buy a U.S. Congress.”

Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), head of the House Republican Conference, compares union leaders who are “trampling” across Washington to the rampaging dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park.”

“They’re lumbering, they’re extinct, they’re in denial . . . big labor bossa-sauruses,” Boehner recently told a meeting of business lobbyists and representatives.

Still, he conceded that in January’s special Senate race in Oregon, labor did contribute to the narrow victory of Democrat Ron Wyden by pouring in 37 full-time workers, 350,000 pieces of mail and $138,000 in campaign funds. “That’s just the beginning,” he warned.

Labor is reveling in the attacks.

“I would rather they see us as someone to fight with than for us to be irrelevant . . . as we have been,” said McEntee.

The ranks of organized labor have been dwindling steadily--total union membership declined from 20 million in 1980 to 16.7 million in 1994 even as the U.S. work force was expanding from 90 million to 113 million. Organized labor’s share of the work force peaked at 35% in 1945. By 1994, the figure was less than 15%.

Organized labor’s sagging political fortunes reflected its declining share of the work force. As blue-collar jobs dwindled, so did the bastions of traditional union strength--in steel, automobiles, aircraft, tires and chemicals.

The new jobs were in the service sector--government, retail trade, financial services and the like. Although these jobs were not unionized to the extent that manufacturing had been, labor made inroads in some areas.

Particularly successful was the Service Employees International Union, whose membership, including nurses, janitors and many Los Angeles County employees, has nearly doubled from 573,000 in 1979 to more than a million now. Its president during much of this period was Sweeney.

During Sweeney’s tenure, the union embraced aggressive and militant tactics, including mass picketing and demonstrations that blocked traffic. Now he is bringing the same style to the AFL-CIO.

Sweeney gave the go-ahead for the organization to designate this summer “Union Summer,” evoking memories of the civil rights movement’s “Freedom Summer” in 1964. More than 1,000 college students and young workers will be dispatched to sites around the country to help local unions flex their muscles.

Sweeney picked Steve Rosenthal, a labor movement veteran and former official in President Clinton’s Labor Department, to direct a revamped political organizing drive. His first mandate is to reverse the results of the 1994 elections, when Republicans gained control of Congress. To do that, he will have to reverse years of erosion in the labor vote, which was once solidly Democratic but went 40% Republican in 1994.

“We look at this Congress as being extremely radical,” Rosenthal said. He said the AFL-CIO will focus on defeating “the worst offenders, who are constantly sticking it to working families.”

One under attack is Rep. Brian P. Bilbray, a freshman Republican from San Diego who won a close race. Last year, the AFL-CIO hit Bilbray with ads opposing the GOP plan to slow the growth in Medicare. In January, its ads blamed Bilbray’s party for the two partial shutdowns of the federal government. Most recently, the ads have been about the minimum wage, and have offered a toll-free 800 line so anyone so inclined can tell Bilbray to “stop the games, stop the gimmicks and raise the minimum wage.”

Bilbray angrily denounced that campaign as an example of the work of “labor bosses who sit in smoke-filled rooms and figure out how to put together a big lie to nail a young freshman congressman.”

Sweeney and the other union leaders “are claiming to be holier than thou and blessed with divine guidance,” Bilbray said. “But they play dirty, naked politics.”

The business community, trying to deal with the political comeback of labor, “is definitely playing catch-up at this point,” said Richard B. Berman, a consultant who represents hotel and restaurant firms.

The $35-million political fund provides labor’s heavy artillery. Most of the money--$21 million--will go for TV, radio and newspaper ads directed against GOP House members in as many as 75 districts. The rest will support registration and get-out-the-vote drives for union members and training for political organizers.

Beyond the fund, the AFL-CIO has dispatched nationwide about 100 union staff members whom it has trained in running political campaigns and voter registration and education drives.

“We’ve got to do a better job of mobilizing people than we have in the past,” said Rosenthal. He and other union officials repeatedly pay tribute to the organizing talents of one of their staunchest opponents, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. The coalition reaches out with the distribution of millions of voter education guides that feature the positions of candidates on key social and political issues.

“Ralph Reed copied what the labor movement used to do,” said McEntee, “and now we’ve got to copy him.”