This article appears in tomorrow's print edition of the Current.
Half a century ago, Chicago’s workers oiled the machine. There was Big Boss Daley and, close behind him, Chicago’s union bosses.
But the city has changed. Blue collars have become white collars. Warehouses have become galleries. Factories have shut down.
So have the union bosses lost power in Chicago?
“The basic premise that unions have lost influence is very true,” says Henry Tamarin, president of Unite Here Local 1, which represents about 15,000 service workers in the Chicago area. “The only tool we have is to organize more workers.”
And for unions, more workers are hard to find — a reality that has threatened the value of their electoral endorsements and legislative lobbying.
To be sure, unions have grown richer and more sophisticated since organized labor’s heyday in Chicago. Public-sector and service unions, in particular, are booming as government grows and manufacturing jobs leave the United States.
Yet labor leaders say that overall, union membership has waned, forcing organizers to compensate for a decline in numbers.
Tamarin’s union now has a political director, for example, allowing it to wage campaigns and draw attention at high levels of government.
“With that loss of density, unions have also become more sophisticated,” Tamarin says. “If we get engaged, we are more likely to put greater resources into it.”
Kelly Dietrich, a political consultant with Chicago’s Dover Group, says that while unions can still put “boots on the ground” for candidates, their growing campaign coffers have led labor leaders to use more expensive tools than volunteers.
“They’ve gotten smarter over time and realized it’s not just about getting hundreds of people out and knocking on doors,” Dietrich says. “It’s about reaching thousands of people on television.”
Yet high-profile advisers and millions in campaign spending still have not delivered the results some labor leaders anticipated when they helped elect Barack Obama and other Democrats in the 2008 elections.
The Employee Free Choice Act, a federal measure that would allow workers to organize more easily, remains on the congressional back burner.
And the fate of a national health-care bill, already less than the liberal ideal, remains unresolved.
“It’s a constant battle,” says John Cameron, political director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’ Illinois council. “Just because we pick the right horse in the presidential race doesn’t mean that we get to demand change in the country. It’s never that simple.”
But while campaign strategists, and particularly Democratic ones, do not dismiss the value of support from unions, they say they do not rely on them the way they did during the height of the Daley political machine.
Bob Kettlewell, spokesman for U.S. Senate candidate Cheryle Jackson, says unions are still a vital part of the political process.
But “endorsements don’t win elections,” he says. “We welcome support from union members, but we don’t need labor endorsements to win.”
It’s a pronouncement that might have been unimaginable from a Democratic campaign 50 years ago.
Leon Fink, a labor historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says unions played a pivotal role in Democratic politics since the late 1800s.
In the 1940s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, now part of the AFL-CIO, set up one of the first political action committees, launching its preferred candidates into positions of power.
By the 1970s, Fink says, deindustrialization and racial divisions started to tear apart unions, just as the Daley political machine was in decline.
Now, heightened competition in the political sphere has led unions to reunite and act more cohesively, a tactic that could help them regain some of their lost influence.
“What we’ve seen in more recent times is, overall, a dramatic decline in union density,” Fink says, “but at the same time, paradoxically, an enhanced role in the Democratic Party as a financier and fund-raising element.”
Philip Molfese, a campaign strategist with Chicago’s Grainger Terry Inc., says the paradox is logical.
Union members, now part of a smaller group, feel more threatened than ever.
“The ones who are left tend to feel a little bit under attack,” Molfese says. “The loss in membership is a negative, but you’re still going to have a group of people, who because of that loss, are more galvanized than ever.”