Election Day 2006 was a cold one in Albany, so Danny Donohue, president of the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA), wore a sweatshirt when he went out to wave a sign above his head, urging drivers to head to the polls on their way home. The sweatshirt was from Sen. Hillary Clinton’s re-election campaign. The sign was from State Sen. Joseph Bruno’s.

“People stopped and said ‘Are you confused?’” Donohue recalled. “And I said, ‘No, I’m selective.’”

Donohue says he will wait until he hears back from the ranks of the CSEA over the summer before endorsing any candidates for this year’s elections, especially in those races that will contribute to the closely watched battle for the State Senate. But neither he nor just about anyone else will be surprised if and when the union decides to back most of the Republican candidates in this year’s State Senate elections.

This is the way things are in New York politics, and the way they have been for decades, though on the national level, few unions would ever consider backing the GOP for much of anything. The Democrats have the majority in the Assembly. The Republicans have the majority in the State Senate. For the most part, union support in the state helps keep things that way.

But this year, loyalties may be tested. With the margins so slim for both the majority as a whole and in many individual races, more people, both inside and outside of the state’s organized labor movement, will be paying attention to what the candidates do and who their supporters are. With the stakes so high and the scrutiny so intense, some are beginning to wonder whether this year’s races will expose fault lines in the unusual relationship between the Senate Republicans and many several top union leaders—who tend to see eye-to-eye on larger contract measures, but not on many other issues. Control of the Senate may very well rest on how tight a rein union leaders will be able to keep on their members to make their endorsements matter.
 
According to Labor Research Association executive director Jonathan Tasini there is a basic question of philosophy which union leaders will have to answer.

“The debate to watch going forward is this: can the labor movement as a whole argue that long term, it’s better for their overall friends to be in control, or will there be a view that we support incumbents if they support us?” he said.

For Donohue and CSEA, the logic is simple: he has no interest in simply preserving the status quo or fear of risking his closeness with the leadership in both chambers. Keeping the Republicans in power in the Senate is a basic matter of self-preservation.

Especially with David Paterson or any other Democrat as governor, Donohue said he believes the CSEA needs the Republicans in control of the Senate. Without them in the majority, he said, his and other unions’ ability to play the different factions off each other for their own benefit would be limited or eliminated. For unions in New York, Donohue said, two parties will always be better than one.

“If there were three that were very effective, I’d say keep all three,” he said. “The nightmare is if you have a governor who is the same party as the Assembly and the Senate.”

Nationally, unions have been suffering lately, but not in New York. Between the many unions and their many acronyms, there are more organized workers in New York than any other state but California, and New York has the highest member density of any state in the nation. Last year, 25.2 percent of New York households reported having at least one union member, up from 24.4 percent in 2006. The national average is 12.1 percent. New York’s unions have more voices to speak, more money to spend and more votes to cast than their counterparts anywhere else in America. In many cases, the membership of a single union in New York is larger than the entire labor movement in other states.

Without the contentiousness that exists on the national level between the coalition unions AFL-CIO and Change to Win, and with the unusual solidarity among New York’s unions in backing the parties in power in each chamber, labor’s grip on state politics remains firm. 

There were fewer than five million total votes in the 2006 gubernatorial election. There are two million active union members in New York. With these sorts of numbers, said Communications Workers of America (CWA) legislative and political director Bob Master, New York should be the most labor-friendly state in the nation. That New York is not, Master said, has much to do with so many unions and the state AFL-CIO largely following the lead of the public employees unions in sticking tight behind the Senate Republicans.



But for unions which represent workers in the private sector, dependent on government for regulations and not for their contracts, Master said, backing the Senate Republicans does not make much sense. That is why his union and others, like the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) have committed themselves to helping the Democrats take the Senate.

“If the public employees unions want to do things for their benefit, great. But why expand that to the whole labor movement?” he asked. “I understand where they’re coming from and they understand where I’m coming from. The question is: What should the posture of the entire labor movement be?”

To Master, the many years that workers compensation reform languished in the Legislature before Eliot Spitzer signed the new law last March is a demonstration of how the general labor approach to politics in the state has in fact hurt many workers.

“If you’ve already agreed in advance that automatically, we’re going to endorse you, then you end up, as we did before Spitzer, with a workers compensation benefit that ranked 49th in the country,” he said. “It was ridiculous that you had the most unionized state in the country with the largest union involvement and literally the worst workers compensation law in the country.”

The next major labor battle, Master said, should be for a paid family leave act. The CWA, in coordination with the Working Families Party and other like-minded unions, will continue to lead the charge on this issue, but he is skeptical that they will have much success. As long as Republicans remain in the majority, the more particular interests of the larger public employees unions will undoubtedly get priority, Master said.

If and when the Democrats succeed in the fall, the CWA and other unions that help Democrats this year will have some solid friends in the new majority. But Master dismissed the idea that the unions which endorse Republicans this year will find doors shut to them. The almost undoubtedly small margin of majority for the foreseeable future will ensure that, he said.

How that will play out over the next few years, with the Senate majority potentially flipping back and forth, remains unclear. For the huge unions, there is not much to lose by backing the Republicans. Together, members of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and 1199 alone make up almost half of all the union members in New York—mean that these unions will continue to keep steering the political process, no matter whom they back. Depending on what happens in the next few election cycles, these unions may not need to play the Assembly Democrats and Senate Republicans off each other: playing the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate off each other, back and forth, could provide more than enough opportunities to gain advantage.

The CWA and like-minded unions know the drill. With 80,000 members, the CWA is one of the larger private employees unions in the state, and one of the most politically active. But they are dwarfed by the public employees unions’ ranks, bank accounts and capacity to mobilize.

“We’re significant players in New York,” Master said. “But size matters in politics. And the ability matters.”

Already this year, the NYSUT quietly scuttled legislation which would have linked teacher tenure to standardized test performance. Looking forward to what may be the next major legislative battle, NYSUT president Richard Iannuzzi has repeatedly argued that the current thinking on property tax reform relies too heavily on trying to find a cap, which he says could end up shortchanging public school budgets. If a cap is proposed by the Property Tax Commission chaired by Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi (D), NYSUT has indicated a commitment to fighting it. Iannuzzi is optimistic that the union will succeed.

Though NYSUT has a deeper bank account and thicker ranks than most, Iannuzzi said that the changes in the climate for organized labor overall have forced his union and others to recalibrate to new methods beyond donating to campaigns or expensive lobbying. Like other unions, NYSUT’s regular training seminars for members prepare them to most effectively flex the union muscles not by calling on the members’ dues, but by calling on the 600,000 members themselves.

The options, after all, are not only to endorse either the incumbent Republican senators or their Democratic opponents. Without sufficient assurances from specific candidates and the leadership’s overall approach to backing labor, unions could choose to simply sit out certain races. In elections expected to come down to a few thousand votes, any one of the major unions not choosing a candidate could amount to a choice in itself—because despite the hits union power has taken since its national heyday most of a century ago, there is still nothing in New York that matches the electoral clout of organized labor.

These days, that is less about campaign contributions, with more the business community investing more of its own dollars in the political process. But nothing competes with union power for filling phone banks and cars full of get out the vote volunteers.

“The ability to influence issues is considerably less, which is why there’s a new emphasis in union organizing,” Brynien said. “Big business has the money. We have the hands and feet.”

Though having union members to petition or help fill rallies is important, at the end of the day, elections are decided in the voting booth. Union members consistently vote in much higher numbers than the population at large, and with so many union members in New York, some political analysts calculate that each union endorsement is worth close to three and half times as many votes as there are members in the union. But though having an active presence in Albany helps, Iannuzzi said the key to success is targeting legislators in their district offices, where they tend to have fewer meetings than at the Legislative Office Building while in session.

“When a piece of legislation is harmful to students or members, we can effectively produce thousands of emails and phone calls to legislators. We have trained our local leaders to knock on doors and appear in a legislator’s office back home,” Iannuzzi said. “If I’m a legislator, I tend to listen to the people who are more vocal, rather than counting the numbers. That’s where we’ve been very effective.”

Though other unions also employ this method, Iannuzzi joked that a union of teachers is particularly well-suited to getting its messages across to sometimes unreceptive audiences.

“A good lesson plan has an aim, it has content, it has a summary, and probably has a follow-up assignment,” he said.

When pitched correctly, Iannuzzi said, “the legislators are fantastic students.”



Teachers have field trips and detention to hold out as promises and threats to their students. Unions have endorsements to grant or withhold, though for NYSUT, as with CSEA, 1199SEIU and many of the public employee unions, the die has largely been cast. 1199, which gets most of the attention for its historically close relationship with state Republicans, has reportedly committed to backing exclusively GOP candidates in the fall, and both Donohue and Ianuzzi said they expect to follow suit.

Ken Brynien, president of the Public Employees Federation (PEF), said his phone is constantly ringing with Democrats looking to win PEF support and Republicans seeking reassurances. Though endorsements will not be made until the summer, Brynien said he has a sense of how his union will vote.

“The Republicans are asking us to help them stay in control and the Democrats are asking us to help them come into the majority. We’re trying to maintain good relationships with all of them,” he said. “But we have supported Joe Bruno for many years, and he has proven to be a friend of ours.”

Brynien rejected the idea that he or anyone else at PEF will vote on party lines. Despite his preference for Bruno remaining majority leader, Brynien said he will still demand each race be considered individually, even in the unlikely event that this means backing fewer of Bruno’s members than the Republicans will need to stay in control.

“If we get 30 Republicans that we like and we can’t stand any of the others, it would be hard to say, ‘We’ve got to find two more to endorse just because we like Joe,’” he said.

Aware of how critical their endorsements will be, union leaders may try to capitalize on the moment to win support for even more things on their agendas.

“This year’s going to be a very difficult year for everybody, because loyalties are going to be tested, and people are going to be demanding greater assistance,” Brynien said. “And some unions are going to demand greater understanding of what getting union backing means."