2008 in Review: Workers Sign Up with AFL-CIO Unions
Here’s the third part in our series taking a look back at 2008. Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
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May-June
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Union members knocked on the first of what would be 10 million of union voters’ doors around the country to talk with them about the key working family issues in the 2008 elections. In the late spring and early summer, we focused on John McCain’s record on health care and the economy.
Along with door-to-door walks, union members mobilized through phone banks, labor council meetings, political training, worksite leafleting and public events.
As union volunteers talked with union members about McCain plans to tax their health care benefits, other union activists were shadowing McCain’s every stop, demanding real health care solutions answers and not just Band-Aid solutions.
2008 in Review: McCain Revealed and McCain Reviled
Here’s the second part in our series taking a look back at 2008. Check out Part 1 here.
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March-April
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The job loss hits kept coming—63,000 in February and 83,000 in March. But President Bush and congressional Republicans kept up their fight against extending unemployment insurance benefits to workers who run out of benefits before finding new work in a crumbling economy.
In April, more than 400 central labor councils begin dedicating their monthly meetings to educating and mobilizing their members around health care reform for the coming elections. Most saw huge turnouts.
Union members continued making endorsements in the primaries, many selecting Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) or Barack Obama (D-Ill). But they were unified in their opposition to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and showed up at campaign stop after campaign stop urging him to meet with workers. He never did.
Meanwhile the AFL-CIO launched McCain Revealed, a website detailing McCain’s long anti-working family career and dangerous policy proposals.
2008 in Review: Remember January, With a Jobless Rate of 5 Percent?
It was a classic “Good News-Bad News Year” for working families in 2008. First, the good news. Working families mobilized to Turn Around America and gave a pink slip to McBush, electing Barack Obama and ending eight years of the most anti-worker administration in U.S. history.
Now, the bad news. Millions of workers got their own pink slips as the Bush economy tumbled even faster toward disaster. In between, the Employee Free Choice Act gained momentum, health care reform jumped to the forefront in the public debate and workers continued to fight anti-worker employers and weak labor laws to form unions and bargain for a better life.
Here’s the first of a six-part AFL-CIO Now blog series on the year that was.
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January-February
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In what became a month-by-month flood of bad economic news, the first unemployment report of the year showed the jobless rate jumping to 5 percent—at the time, the highest level in two years. But the worst was to come. A month later, news came that for the first time in four years, the economy lost jobs—17,000 of them. That first wave of job loss was a tsunami by year’s end.
With the economy’s downhill ride gaining speed, the AFL-CIO proposed a five-point economic-recovery plan to turn it around. President Bush and congressional Republicans blocked the sweeping stimulus package, even denying aid to the growing number of jobless.
In a rare bit of good economic news—the result of a 2006 and 2007 mobilization by the AFL-CIO and other groups to raise state minimum wages—low-wage worker in 14 states got a pay raise Jan 1.
Working Families Propel Obama to White House, Win in Senate, House
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After last night’s historic election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney sums it up well, saying:
The political pendulum is swinging back toward sanity, after many months of work by people of all ages, races, stations and faiths hungry for change.
Obama’s victory was sealed when West Coast polls closed last night, and we await the final calls in North Carolina and Missouri, where the race between Obama and Sen. John McCain remains too close to call. As of 11 a.m., Obama has 349 electoral votes in his column and McCain 163.
The popular vote total tally stands at Obama, with 62.4 million (52 percent) and McCain, 55.4 million (46 percent).
Several important congressional races remain too close call. Working families picked up five Senate seats last night, but the races in Alaska, Georgia and Oregon still remain too close to call.
Obama-Biden Win for Working Families
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| Barack Obama, president for working families. | |
We’re cheering as we write: Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be the next U.S. president and vice president, respectively, propelled to the nation’s highest office with the critical support of union members in the labor movement’s biggest-ever get-out-the-vote mobilization. The Obama-Biden ticket so far has won 284 electoral votes, more than the 270 needed for victory and all votes from the states have not been tallied. And although the Senate count is not yet final, working families so far have voted in another four union-endorsed candidates to the U.S. Senate.
After eight years of an administration hostile to unions, workers and a working-family friendly economy, America’s union members helped bring about much-needed change by electing Obama and working family-friendly candidates up and down the ballot.
In Final Debate, Obama Leads on Working Family Issues
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In their final debate last night, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain clashed on a variety of issues, from health care to trade to education, and left working families with no doubt that Obama is the candidate who has the record, the policy plans and the vision to turn around America.
Speaking frequently to viewers at home, Obama reiterated his strong economic message, making clear he understands strengthening the economy requires leadership to rebuild our middle class, provide jobs and invest in long-term solutions in energy, health care and education. The contrast between Obama’s focus on these critical issues and McCain’s scattered attacks was obvious. Whenever McCain tried to pull the debate away to misleading character attacks or superficial issues, Obama pulled it back to the central issues that voters care about.
There is nothing wrong with us having a vigorous debate like we’re having tonight about health care, about energy policy, about tax policy. That’s the stuff that campaigns should be made of.
Obama’s Economic Plans Would Benefit America’s Workers
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The last time we faced a Bush recession, presidential candidate Bill—”It’s the economy stupid!”—Clinton offered voters an economic alternative to the failed Bush I policies and went on to create eight years of national prosperity.
Today, as the Bush II recession explodes, littering the nation’s economy with failed banks, Wall Street bailouts and disappearing jobs, Sen. Barack Obama offers an economic plan to steady the economy and bail out Main Street. (Click here to view Obama’s new two-minute campaign ad in which he details his economic plans.)
Speaking at the Machinists (IAM) convention last week, Obama said that for nearly eight years, the Bush administration—with the backing of Sen. John McCain, who has a 90 percent Bush voting record—sat back and watched as
corporate lobbyists wrote our laws and put their clients’ interest ahead of what’s fair for the American people.
