Winning union campaigns

Campaigns & Elections,  June-July, 1993  by Christina Bartolomeo

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The American Federation of Teachers captures workplace elections with hi-tech, hi-touch tactics

Imagine a campaign in which you face decades of negative public opinion about your candidate. . . in which you can't use television or radio. . . and in which your opponent can fire voters who support you. This scenario is business as usual for union campaigners.

"If you think electoral politics is dirty, then union representation elections are a mudslide," says Richard Bensinger, executive director of the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute. Bensinger points out that the odds are stacked in favor of the employer, particularly in private sector campaigns.

There are three basic types of union election campaigns: defensive, in which a local is challenged by another union; challenge, the effort of the invading union; and organizing, in which a union is attempting to win collective bargaining rights for public or private sector employees who are not represented by any union.

The three varieties of union campaigns have slight differences in strategy considerations. For example, a defensive campaign may hit the opponent's negatives more frequently than a challenge campaign, in the hope of convincing shop members that a change is risky. Strategy for challenging will usually appeal to the voter's sense that he deserves more competent and aggressive representation.

How do you win a vote that could cost someone their livelihood? It takes a combination of classic grassroots organizing, creative message delivery, and chutzpah.

Success Against the Odds

The 800,000-member American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is one of the fastest-growing public employee unions in the AFL-CIO, with a membership increase of 227,000 between 1984 and 1992. After bringing collective bargaining to New York City teachers through a series of strikes in the '60s and '70s, AFT's aggressiveness motivated its larger rival -- the National Education Association -- to finally take up the practice of contract negotiations.

Less than a decade after the first AFT strike in New York City, nearly half the teachers in the country were engaging in some form of collective bargaining. In the last 10 years, AFT has also been active in organizing blue-collar school employees and teachers' aides; higher education faculty; state, county, and municipal employees; and nurses and health care professionals.

How has one union found success in workplace elections at a time when union support on the whole has dramatically dwindled? A few stereotypes have proved critical.

Most AFT campaigners believe one-on-one proselytizing remains the union's best tool for defusing voters' negative images of trade unions.

"Especially for people who've never had a contract, a union is an abstraction," says Juanita Dunlap-Smith, who has been running AFT election campaigns for the past 18 years. At the beginning, she creates organizing teams at each work-site--not national union staff, but local union members. The strategy, as related by Dunlap-Smith, is to make the movement as close to the ground as possible:

"Our campaign messages come from a credible source -- co-workers our voters will trust. We use at least four separate assessments over the course of a campaign. Because of multiple assessments, you're so sure of who your voters are that you're offering them rides to the polls and baby-sitting their kids so they can vote. That sort of targeted organizing can't be duplicated in most political campaigns."

Richard Sanders, a former community organizer who is spearheading AFT's campaigns for nurses and health care employees in Rhode Island, believes one-on-one organizing is the only way to beat the private sector management.

"These campaigns can be incredibly vicious," he insists, "We're telling voters, you have to help us build the union. We're letting them know up front how tough it's going to be. Because if people are afraid, the hospital will kick the shit out of us in a campaign."

AFT campaign writer Larry Doyle offers a historical perspective: "Union elections are a lot like municipal elections were 60 years ago. Our building stewards are like precinct captains used to be. Unions have never forgotten the importance of one-on-one persuasion."

Putting on A Face

Despite their heavy reliance on human contact, major AFT campaigns now usually use polling and focus groups. Campaign managers and writers work with polling data to narrow the issues and create literature.

Most veteran campaigners see literature as icing on the cake. Campaign writer Rick Kuplinski notes, "Literature can lose you an election but it won't win one by itself."

During his 10 years with the union, Kuplinski has perfected a style that "puts a face on the union." For example, in campaigns in Wichita, Kansas, and Volusia County, Florida, Kuplinski designed a series of flyers that used photos to debunk negative stereotypes. One shows two smiling Wichita Federation of Teachers members (the woman wearing a t-shirt decorated with teddy bears and hearts). Underneath the photo of these guy-and-gal-next-door types is the headline "union bosses." The flyer copy points out that local members like these control the AFT's local unions.