1.3 Million Calls to Union Households—and We’ve Just Begun

AFL-CIO Politics and Field Director Karen Ackerman highlights the concrete  accomplishments of union activists in educating and mobilizing union voters even before Labor Day—and notes we’ve just begun.

Labor 2006 is the most ambitious, sophisticated voter education and mobilization program we’ve ever developed. And it needs to be, since we’re faced with a formidable challenge: to take back our government at every level for working families.

We know it’s hard work, and it can’t be done overnight, or jammed into a few frantic months between Labor Day and Election Day. And that’s why union members and union leaders have been working steadily for months—first, on a strategic plan to target our efforts, and now, on the critical member mobilization effort. Here’s what we’ve already accomplished—before Labor Day as part of our Labor 2006 political outreach.

• Placed more than 1.3 million calls to union members and their households;
• Sent more than 1.1 million pieces of mail to our members and members’ households;
• Printed more than 2.6 million Labor 2006 customized fliers for walks and worksite leafleting.
• Developed 264 different resource materials for use on the “Working Families Toolkit.”
• Recruited more than 20,000 new activists through mail, phone, online and legislative actions.
• Developed a comprehensive website, www.votenov7.com, that offers options for volunteering in your community, finding events, registering to vote, downloading PDF candidate comparison fliers, accessing state-by-state issues guides and more.

The strategy? Union members talking with union members about the issues and candidates at worksites, at their doors during labor walks, on the telephone at volunteer phone banks and through mail from their local unions. 

The goal? Electing candidates who will turn America back in the right direction for working families and reverse Bush administration policies and actions that have stagnated working families’ wages, made pensions an endangered species, put health care costs out of reach and run the national debt over the horizon.   

In the next two months, our education and mobilization actions will multiply. This weekend kicks off a new round of door-to-door walks. Thousands of union volunteers in 21 states will visit union families to discuss where their congressional and state candidates stand on working family issues and to encourage them to volunteer their time.

Click here to see if a labor-to-labor walk is set for your area.

Next week, we will kick up Labor 2006 worksite leafleting actions another notch with thousands of actions set for union worksites in vital contested states.

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