iowa underground blog

The Des Moines Register this morning picked up the story of AFCSME’s endorsement of Mike Blouin in Iowa’ gubernatorial race.

Democrat Mike Blouin’s campaign for governor received a big boost Tuesday by landing a key labor endorsement.

Iowa Council 61 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has backed the winning candidate in Iowa Democratic gubernatorial primaries dating from 1986, the first year the union made a primary endorsement, union officials said.

There is an obvious ‘win’ here in terms of campaign organization and grassroots involvement for Blouin. However, it’s interesting to note how much influence that AFSCME ( a public sector union) might have on the electorate as a whole. Following the last election, Bruce Bartlett asked the question: do union endorsements matter anymore?

Bartlett’s article looked at older union membership statistics – here are statistics from 2004.

Code	State	Sector	Obs	Employment	Members	Covered	%Mem	%Cov
42	Iowa	Total	3,316	1,344,936	141,040	170,653	10.5	12.7
42	Iowa	Private	2,783	1,127,889	80,659	91,484	7.2	8.1
42	Iowa	Public	533	217,047	60,381	79,169	27.8	36.5
42	Iowa	Priv. Construction	166	66,953	11,994	12,814	17.9	19.1
42	Iowa	Priv. Manufacturing	589	236,534	47,388	51,794	20.0	21.9

Data From unionstats.com

Something that is important to note – Iowa’s “union voice” is becoming increasingly that of the public sector unions. Note that while Iowa’s private sector employs approximately one million more workers, the union membership totals only have a gap of 20,000. (Hence the note that while nearly 36.5% of Iowa’s public sector employees are union members, only 8.1% of private sector employees belong to a union.)

Bartlett notes an “issue gap” between the growing influence of public sector unions versus private sector unions:

Since public-sector unions have less concern for the meat-and-potatoes economic issues that primarily motivate private-sector union members, they tend to be much more ideological, often involving themselves in issues outside the direct economic interests of their members. These would include supporting strict environmental regulations that cost jobs for their private-sector brethren. Consequently, it is no surprise that government employee unions backed Howard Dean over Dick Gephardt.

As it turned out, both the private-sector unions and the public-sector unions took a hit in Iowa. According to entrance polls, union members accounted for just 23 percent of Iowa caucus attendance, down from 33 percent as recently as 2000. Of those union members voting, 29 percent backed John Kerry; Dean and John Edwards each got 22 percent, and Gephardt got just 19 percent. The polls also indicate that just 50,000 of Iowa’s union members, less than a third, are now registered as Democrats.

It seems that this difference between public and private sector employees is becoming a stumbling block. After all, several aspects of Iowa’s labor law need to be significantly retooled, yet the candidates backed by the public sector unions seem to show no interest in revisiting the regulations on the books. (Of course, the Iowa GOP influence in the Statehouse doesn’t help things, either.)

Some of this is naturally organizational, but Iowa Democrats need to realize the importance of labor law (and private sector unions) not only from a policy perspective but a strategic perspective as well: workers who are actively engaged in union organization are more likely to consider economics when casting votes – not the constant drum beating of the “culture war” that seems to crop up every election cycle.

• Sousy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 6:37 am and is filed under Politics, Iowa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.