by Mike Hall, Mar 7, 2007

Union members will be more involved than ever in deciding which presidential candidate will carry the union label in the 2008 election. In a plan outlined this morning in Las Vegas at the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council annual winter meeting, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says:

The breadth and depth of our effort to engage union members and their families in the 2008 presidential endorsement process will be unparalleled. This will be a very bottom-up process.

Beginning this spring and running through a major presidential forum in August, the plan outlines a series of grassroots-centered actions to hear from working family voters about their concerns and to give them opportunities and new tools to learn about the candidates.

But as both Sweeney and AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, chairman of the Executive Council’s political committee, say, there is no rush to tap a candidate for labor’s endorsement before union members have the chance to thoroughly investigate each candidate on all the issues. Says McEntee:

Our members are more than just voters. They are our messengers. They’re the roots in grassroots that will drive this process. They will be able to look at every candidate’s record, position on the issues and viability in the campaign—after all, we want to win.

Sweeney says the endorsement blueprint is aimed at candidates, too.

We will also make sure the candidates for president are listening to working people on our top concerns—like jobs, health care, retirement security, the growing wage gap and the freedom to form or join unions to bargain for a better life.

 The presidential endorsement plan includes:

• Each of the AFL-CIO’s 54 unions reaching out to its members and engaging them in wide-raging discussions about the candidates, as AFSCME did recently at its Carson City, Nev., candidate forum and as the Communications Workers of America, Fire Fighters, Machinists and AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department plan to do in the near future;
• A series of grassroots Working Family Issue Forums during the spring and early summer that will bring working people together to learn more about the candidates and discuss their merits;
• A series of discussions in towns and cities across the country for union members and their families to discuss major issues with presidential candidates;
• New tools working family voters can use—including cutting-edge interactive online resources—to give them a chance to share ideas, to help them make their decision and to be part of the endorsement process;
• A major candidate forum in August in Chicago where major candidates for president will have a chance to detail their plans to support working families.

The endorsement plan asks all AFL-CIO unions to refrain from endorsing a candidate until the AFL-CIO General Board meets in the fall to decide if it’s time to endorse a candidate or wait until after the primaries. That decision will be based on the months-long grassroots actions and union member input, and an endorsement will require a two-thirds majority of the board.

The AFL-CIO’s member mobilization for the 2006 elections was the largest ever and for the first time in a decade brought a Democratic majority and:

set this country on a new course. But even after last fall’s rejection of its policies, the Bush administration has refused to listen to working people’s concerns—escalating the war in Iraq while continuing to follow a path that puts the interests of Wall Street above the needs of Main Street.

It’s time to finish what we started.