Scoring downstate Illinois' Reps. on workers issues

Bill Knight column for 10-17, 18 or 19, 2019

Scorecards aren’t as good as watching what’s going on, but in hindsight they can offer some perspective or spark memories or context. In scoring elected officials, legislative scorecards are compiled by groups as varied as the American Conservative Union and Conservation Voters to the NAACP and the Women's Public Policy Network. Since most Americans – conservatives, environmentalists, minorities and women – work for a living, the AFL-CIO’s scorecard can be useful in gauging lawmakers’ performance on key issues.

It need not be partisan since both political parties bear some responsibility for the U.S. economic and political system that panders to campaign contributors, corporations and the 1%, as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said this summer when he told Democrats that their party takes labor for granted at its own peril.

Confronting representatives from the field of Democrats’ 2020 presidential candidates at a meeting at an IBEW hall in Detroit, Trumka said, “More often than not, the Republican Party is bad for workers. This president is bad for workers. But let’s be honest about the Democratic Party’s record.”

He cited 1992’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was backed by many Democrats and cost the country more than 850,000 jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was scuttled by President Trump, probably because it had been negotiated by President Obama. Both were tilted against workers, Trumka said.

Looking back at 2017 – the first year of the Trump administration, when Republicans had majorities in both the House and Senate – the AFL-CIO’s assessment of downstate Illinois’ U.S. Representatives’ votes then shows that Democratic Congresswoman Cheri Bustos of the Quad Cities was strongly supportive of labor issues.

Her 97-percent performance stands in stark contrast to Central Illinois’ two Republican Congressmen, Darin LaHood of Peoria and Rodney Davis of Taylorville, who were scored at 29 percent and 23 percent, respectively.

The labor federation’s legislative scorecard tracked 34 measures on which the House of Representatives voted. Those issues ranged from non-controversial topics such as an April 2017 Copyrights Accountability balloting to contentious subjects such as Prevailing Wage laws – a long-time target of anti-union forces on local, state and national levels.

Oddly – perhaps due to lobbying by organized labor, or the makeup of area constituents – Bustos, Davis and LaHood all agreed not only on the copyright bill, but also on protecting Prevailing Wage.

Extremist Capitol Hill legislators attempted to repeal Prevailing Wage laws five times in 2017, when conservatives sought to kill the protection through the National Defense Authorization Act that July, through the Make America Secure Appropriations Act the same month, and three others times that September.

As to the political parties in general, too often elected officials and their campaign consultants dismiss organized labor because “only” 10.5 percent of the nation’s labor force is unionized, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

However, that means out of BLS’ definition of the labor force (163,350,000), 17,151,750 Americans belong to unions. That obviously dwarfs the number of other interest groups, such as health-insurance CEOs, trial lawyers, executives at large banks and even billionaires (there are about 540 billionaires in the United States, according to Forbes business magazine). Arguably, all their money translates to influence, but they also each get one vote – the same as a unionized worker.

Further, organizations of mass constituencies, whether unions or interest groups such as the NAACP, NRA, etc., can use their collective muscle – their “boots on the ground” – to register voters, canvass or phone-bank, get out the vote, and so on.

Whether complaining about labor’s numbers, or trying to exploit their resources, workers expect improvement, Trumka said.

 “Working people are hungry for it. But you can’t offer campaign rhetoric or count on workers’ votes simply because you have a ‘D’ next to your name.

“You need to prove that this party is the one and only party for working people,” he continued, “and recognize that unions and collective bargaining are the single best way to make this economy work for everyone.”