Report from the Field: Dayton, Ohio

by Gordon Pavy, Oct 24, 2006

Gordon Pavy, whose Bargaining Digest Weekly is published here each Saturday, is blogging from Ohio where, like many AFL-CIO staff, he’s in the field getting out the vote in this critical election. Check out the video at left for a look at why union volunteers in Ohio are getting out the vote.

I’ve been in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, for four weeks now working on Labor 2006, phone banking, leafleting, scanning. Every morning, I write the collective Bargaining Digest for http://privatenet.aflcio.org/bargaining@work subscribers from a very familiar corner in town where I spent many evenings as a child with my father. At the time, it was a bowling alley, where NCR employees relieved the stress of factory work, now it is a Panera.

Each day on my way here, I pass the still empty lots where he, three of his brothers and 17,000 other workers, mostly World War II veterans, toiled. NCR production and my father’s job left Dayton in the move to cheap labor in Japan in the 1970s. Dayton’s economy never recovered, and now it faces the loss of seven of eight Delphi plants and what happened to my father is occurring now to the Dayton families of my Vietnam veteran generation and the Gulf War and Afghanistan/Iraq War vet generation.

We had a great rally here last week with the entire statewide Democratic ticket. All the local candidates were here, too. The rally was led by gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland, Senate candidate Sherrod Brown and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. Labor made up 90 percent of the crowd. The biggest ovations came from the promise to fight corruption in Columbus and Washington and to change course on the war in Iraqi. Ohio has contributed more to the casualty list than any other state.

Today, I’m off to leaflet a few key precincts before returning to the phone banks.  An interesting thing about the banks—not much support for Republicans, but we’re getting a lot of “we have to have a change” and “they are all corrupt” responses. My take is that these are voters who went Republican in 2004 and who will vote either blue this time or stay home.

We will make a change Nov. 7.

This portion of this website is paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, 815 16th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006, with voluntary contributions from union members and their families, and is not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee. 

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