John Edwards: The Unions’ Man?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3274/the_unions_man/

Features > July 23, 2007
The Unions’ Man?
John Edwards does more than talk the talk on workers’ but will he walk away with labor’s endorsement?
By David Moberg (Iowa City, Iowa)

Dressed in gently faded jeans and a solid dark-blue sport shirt, John Edwards sauntered across the stage of the Northwest Junior High School auditorium on a hot Saturday morning in June, talking to a labor union audience that was warm to him from his opening words.

“My view is not that complicated,” Edwards told the charter convention of Iowa’s Change to Win labor federation in his polished but folksy manner. “If we want to strengthen and grow the middle class in this country, if we want to grow America economically, if we want to see millions of people lifted out of poverty, the organized labor movement is a critical component of that. That’s the reason that wherever I am, I talk about making it easier to organize in the workplace, why that’s important for lifting people out of poverty and to strengthen the middle class.”


If the labor movement put its formidable ground operations behind Edwards it could lift him out of his current third place in the polls and give him a better shot at the nomination.


Politicians often praise unions at union halls, though rarely so effusively. But as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Edwards’ rhetoric goes a couple of steps farther.

A few days before, at a trendy bar in the affluent Streeterville neighborhood in Chicago, Edwards told a group of mainly young Democratic business and professional people that America needed to strengthen the right to organize and create “democracy in the workplace.” And an hour after his Change to Win appearance, he made essentially the same pitch to a crowd of several hundred potential Iowa caucus-goers in the sheep barn at the Johnson County Fairgrounds.

Edwards walks the talk as well, often on picket lines. The week after his swing through Iowa, he joined a rally at the giant Smithfield hog processing plant in his home state to demand that the company, a notorious labor law violator, recognize workers when a majority signs union cards. During the past two years, the Edwards campaign claims, the former senator and vice-presidential candidate has taken part in more than 200 different union events with more than 20 unions, including a national contract campaign tour for hotel workers, a fast with janitors organizing at the University of Miami and an airport rally in Texas for Continental Airlines ramp employees who were organizing.

“He’s redefined the way public officials engage the ongoing work of the labor movement,” says Chris Chafe, the former chief of staff of UNITE HERE and one of several labor officials with high-level positions in the Edwards campaign—not counting campaign manager David Bonior, the former staunchly pro-union congressman who previously headed American Rights at Work, a labor-rights advocacy group. “I don’t think anyone has come so close in recent memory to putting himself so squarely behind issues central to the labor movement. We’d welcome institutional endorsements, but our goal is to have workers and union leaders focus on what he does as well as what he says.”

FULL story at link.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

1. President Edwards. How's that? This man wants UNIONS to be what they were before Reagan nt

Love him!