May 04, 2006
Bayh's Labor (of) Love
The Hotline turns on the h-MRI, launching a series of short scans of WH '08 resumes. Over the next few months, we'll cut to the bone to assess candidates' records when it comes to using them to attract a key primary electorate.
-- Today, we examine Sen. Evan Bayh's relations with organized labor. His recent evolution on trade deals capstones a 25-year alliance with manufacturing unions. Far from a stereotypical DLCer, Bayh backs prevailing wage laws and minimum wage hikes.
Last summer, Madison Capital Times editorialists welcomed Bayh to their state by lecturing him. If he wanted Midwestern Democrats in his corner for the '08 presidential race, "he will need to change his tone on trade issues" Bayh, after all, was associated with "the corporation-funded Democratic Leadership Council." That's a common introduction for the uninitiated. Bombastic populist author/consultant David Sirota has listed Bayh as among those who are "personally responsible for the trade policies that are destroying America's middle class."
But such a colorful encomium does not square with Bayh's record, considered broadly. Nor does it reflect Bayh's prudential, precision-tuned eat-your-labor-baked-cake-and-sell-it-for-a-profit-too ideological positioning ahead of his presidential race.
Evan Bayh -- the centrist from Indiana, five times elected in a conservative state and a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council - is angling for the endorsement of major labor unions and is surprisingly well-equipped to make the pitch.
In discussions with reporters and union leaders, Bayh comes off sounding like an eager student of labor history who's just aced his final exam. Over the past year, he's met privately with the heads of at least a dozen major unions in both the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition. There's another dinner planned for May 24. He's developed a labor-friendly stump speech that regularly receives applause. His outreach effort was "spearheaded by and with advice from his long time friends in labor," an adviser said.
Bayh's career AFL-CIO rating is 91. And his solidarity with labor extends to those public employee unions who've become the DLC's biggest bugbears. He's scored a perfect 100 rating from the American Federation of Teachers for three consecutive legislative cycles. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, as of 2004, gave Bayh a 90 percent rating. (AFSCME's Gerald McEntee is almost an extended member of the Clinton family; Hillary Clinton received a 100 percent lifetime rating from AFSCME.) The libertarian Cato Institute, by contrast, gives him a 33 percent rating out of 100 on trade issues. Over his career, Bayh has received more than $618,000 from labor PACs - nearly $31,000 this cycle alone. Even aides to his prospective rivals do not know that Bayh lauds Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rules and voted to increase the minimum wage by nearly two dollars. If they do, they accuse him of naked pandering. [MARC AMBINDER]
But pandering suggests a recent change of heart. And though Bayh has calibrated his view of trade agreements, the following statement of his is true: "I've always had a good affinity for and a good relationship with organized labor." He continued, in an interview with the Hotline: "The interest of labor and taxpayers and businesses have to be reconciled if we're going to move forward with the country."
DLC v. Labor
Many Democrats want to bracket labor's influence on the party. But unions still supply the overwhelming majority of foot soldiers on Election Day and sit at every high table the party convenes. When Howard Dean's DNC first sent organizers into Michigan to help register voters, it was the state's labor bosses who balked. That was their job, they argued. Don't step on our turf. There are two variants of anti-labor arguments -- one thick with sinister assignations of corruption - the other more delicate and substantive. Many DLCers publicly embrace this thin version, though many privately hold a far more apocalyptic view. In an article written in 1998, the editors of the DLC's house magazine called for a "New Labor" - one opposed to "opposed labor's retrograde agenda for trade protection as well as its attempts to thwart long-overdue reforms in America's underperforming public-sector systems, from welfare to job training to schools. " The DLCers argued that "powerful economic forces" had "shrunk employment" in "heavily unionized industries," and that labor "had failed to respond effectively" to the change. Most unions leaders would agree with that diagnosis, although they attribute more of the chance to the government's unwillingness to fight for "working families." (Keep in mind - this was during the Clinton era.)
The DLC then slammed labor's "attempts to win political influence": by 'boosting campaign spending" and worried that the union hierarchy "too often seeks political allies among left-wing activists and pressure groups, whose causes find little support among rank-and-file union members." The "core dilemma:" "Working Americans struggling to adapt to a New Economy characterized by dispersed economic power, job churning, knowledge-intensive work, flexible organizations, and global integration see little relevance in traditional unionism."
The thick version ascribes just about every problem Democrats face to labor's nefarious influence. Health care reform? Labor can't agree what type of single-payer they'd like. Pension reform? Labor controls a huge pension empire and doesn't want to let go of it. Progressive economic policies? Labor is wedded to government regulations. Efficient government? Labor wants bigger, bloated-er agencies with tough hire and fire rules. Lobbying reform? Corrupt labor bosses would never allow it. Etc.
Bayh subscribes to neither of these grand explanations. He believes that labor's current condition came about because of a grand producer/worker bargain. During World War II, in lieu for wage increases, manufacturing and construction trade unions accepted guaranteed pensions and generous health benefits. For the first thirty years of that compact, businesses found it profitable. Labor amassed a pension kitty worth almost a third of a trillion dollars.
What Bayh Would Tell the DLCers Today
Bayh ascribes the current tension to "a lot of perception and some reality." To the extent that there is substantive disagreement, Bayh blames trade. "It mostly boils down to a difference what is ideal in a theoretical sense [compared to] how things get done in the real world," he says. He said he supports trade agreements in principle but when one party decides to endorse piracy of intellectual property, to manipulate the currency, to subsidize home-grown industry - the reality for Bayh conflicts with the ideal. "I guess if I were to talking to some of economic theorists at the DLC, I'd say, look, we have to reconcile it, just as we're trying to reconcile the interests of business and labor, taxpayers and public employees, we also need to reconcile the interests of consumers and producers." Bayh's favorite historical allusion: "Henry Ford was a very wise men, a smart capitalist. But he knew at the end of the day his workers would have to buy his products."
The CAFTA Vote
In 2005, after much lobbying from his labor allies, Bayh voted against CAFTA. But before that, he broke with labor to support permanent normal trading status with China, to vote in favor of trade agreements between the US and Singapore and between the US and Chile. Yet in 2001, he joined other New Democrats in asking Pres. Bush to include tougher labor standards in trade bills, threatening, in essence, to withhold the margin of victory on key votes without them. Bayh's labor associates suspect he would have voted in favor of NAFTA had he been in the Senate in 1993. But listening to him today, his tone has changed. Like many other Senate Democrats, he seems to regret his earlier votes - particularly on China. "He regrets the failure of the administration to enforce the rules when it comes to China, says an adviser to Bayh. "And that failure has made him very skeptical of future trade agreements, which is why he voted against CAFTA." Since Pres. Bush has taken office, Bayh says, "there is a growing financial gap between in our country. The broad macroeconomic figures look good. But normal people are struggling to make ends meet. Real wages have stagnated." He worries: "Whenever you get class tensions, it's not healthy for anybody. That's when demagogues take root."
Bayh is aware of the ironies: the DLC has long accused labor union leaders of inflaming class antagonisms. And stagnating real wages and wealth inequality helped fuel the AFL-CIO's hard-as-rock opposition to NAFTA in 1993. Vince Panvini, political director for the Sheet Metal Workers, says Bayh "has seen the loss of jobs especially in Indiana. He's seen a lot of them leave… that has a definite impact." Though Dick Gephardt only managed 11 percent of the vote in Iowa even with the support of the states' major manufacturing and building trades unions, "Free or fair trade?" is often the first question asked by skeptical Iowans of potential Democratic candidates.
Get Trippi and Shrum On The Line
In addressing China and its currency, Bayh sounds hauntingly similar to Rep. Dick Gephardt, who in 1988 turned his IA caucus trajectory around by warning South Korea that the US would impose tariffs. (The key Gephardt line: "How many Americans are going to pay $48,000 for one of their Hyundais?") Here's Bayh, speaking before the UAW: "We ought to slap a countervailing tariff on all the products coming out of China and level that playing field to do right by our working men and women." For one well-known labor-connected adviser to presidential rival, that line was astonishing. "It was an enormous leap for him on trade," said this person. "Before that speech, he was basically a free trader."
Worries About China's Leverage
Bayh tracks his worry not to an instinctual concern about labor standards (though he does want them equalized). For him, the concern is geopolitical. . "There is no question that our indebtedness to China weakens America's hand," he told ABC News' Teddy Davis. "Our negotiating leverage with China on trade issues and Iran is severely limited by the amount of debt they hold." In other words, Bayh worries that American sovereignty and its ability to make unconstrained decisions about its national security and economic interests are limited because it risks offending China, who could retaliate for anything it didn't like by sucking up credit lines. The US could spiral into … well, a lot of bad places. China is on Bayh's mind as he discusses why manufacturing sector unions declined so precipitously.
Bayh posits two neutral, conventional explanations: Globalization has put pressure on wages and benefits. And then there's capital substitution -- robots replacing humans on assembly lines - a hallmark of the country's unyielding productivity gains. "And then you've got the phenomenon where countries pursue industrial policies" that deliberately upend stability in world commodity markets. Steel is an example; other countries flooded the market with it, and cheaply. US Steelworkers can't produce product during a global glut. (Bayh supported Pres. Bush's temporary tariff on steel imports.)
Indiana has more operating steel mills than another state, more than West Virginia or even Pennsylvania. At one point, it had more auto workers than neighboring Michigan. It's the home for the nation's sheet metal manufacturing sector. And therefore it's become the tragic hero in the story of the Rust Belt's decline. Bayh traces his bonds with labor to 1980, the year his father lost his Senate seat to Dan Quayle. Speaking to the United Auto Workers in Washington earlier this year, he recalled his father's visit to a local Ford parts plant on a chilly November morning after his father's defeat. "You know, this is kind of a walk down memory lane for me," he told the labor crowd. "Several of the Hoosiers here on my way in said, 'Evan, we love your father, and I said, 'me too!' My father … would be the first one to say, he never would have had that opportunity if I it hadn't been for the UAW." The UAW and other unions provided critical support to Bayh's gubernatorial election. He reciprocated in office. Bayh recalls a promotional banner at a Terre Haute, IN airport touting Indiana's super-low workers' compensation rates. The anecdote now features in Bayh's stump speech to labor. "The first thing they mentioned, you come and locate in Indiana because Indiana has the second lowest rate of workers compensation of any state in the United States of America. Your workers get injured or killed an you don't have to spend much."
Bayh As Pro-Labor Governor
Bayh pushed a legislative fix when he was governor. Over the objection of business lobby, he signed an executive order giving 30,000 state employees collective bargaining rights. Two thirds were UAW; many were AFT teachers, AFSCME employees and police officers. Those unions remember how Bayh sacrificed some political capital in order to help their members. And labor and business allies say he encouraged a climate of, in the words of one state labor leader, "lots of table sitting. It pissed us off, but" it dramatically reduced tensions between corporations and their workers. Bayh's team structured negotiations to make sure that taxpayers could afford the bill. Contracts couldn't be negotiated, for example, when the legislature was in session and therefore suspectable to intense lobbying. But Bayh sided with labor in most major disputes. When the GOP-dominated state legislature passed a bill abolishing compulsory dues-paying for teachers, Bayh vetoed it. (It is law today; the legislature overrode his veto.)
Bayh is known for his tax-cutting, and lore suggests he repeatedly vowed never to sign a tax increase into law. The reality is a bit more complex, but thanks to a roaring 1990s economy, Bayh was able cut hundreds of millions in individual and corporate income taxes, to increase state spending, to care and feed for labor and even leave office with a billion dollar surplus. It's not inaccurate to conclude that both principle and sheer circumstance salted his reputation as both a fiscally responsible DLCer and a labor-friendly Dem.
We Think The World Of Evan
Can He Convince The Rank And File?
Posted at 02:54 PM
Comments
imagine that? sirota levelling unsubstantiating criticism? there's a shocker.
youdon'tsay | 05.04.06 03:04 PM
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Does labor really provide the "overwhelming majority" of GOTV volunteers? I would be awfully surprised if that is true.
Drew Miller | 05.04.06 06:11 PM
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Birch Bayh lobbies for Wal-Mart. Last I checked, the unions aren't on big fans of that company.
Big Labor | 05.04.06 09:38 PM
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