Union Canvassers Reached Millions Before Election Day

Card photograph: ARCHIVE. Palace Hotel workers on strike in San Francisco, October 6, 2018. Photo: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cropped for the card. License. Adaptation shared under the same license. Source photograph.

Nearly 100 union members gathered at IBEW Local 347 in Des Moines on Halloween before heading out to canvass. AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler and Iowa labor president Charlie Wishman joined former senator Tom Harkin and candidates Rob Sand, Josh Turek and Sarah Trone Garriott, according to the federation’s November 2 account.

The local event was part of a national labor turnout operation built around workplace conversations, phone calls and door knocking. It connects to the organizing-rights proposals incoming lawmakers carried into the election: workers were campaigning for politicians who would help determine the rules governing their own unions.

On October 30, the AFL-CIO reported reaching more than 16 million union voters, with tens of thousands of volunteers participating. The federation planned additional visits by Shuler in Iowa and Michigan and by secretary-treasurer Fred Redmond in Pennsylvania and Georgia during the final weekend.

Food, rent and wages at the door

ARCHIVE. Liz Shuler (center) joins a Department of Labor panel on shared prosperity and workforce development in Washington, December 10, 2015. U.S. Department of Labor / Shawn T. Moore. CC BY 2.0; official federal photograph. License. Source photograph.

In Detroit on election morning, People’s World reporter Cameron Harrison described a canvass launch at UNITE HERE Local 24. Michigan’s AFL-CIO told him it had 15 campaign sites, more than 250,000 doors knocked and 132,000 calls to union households. Attorney-general candidate Eli Savit used the gathering to promise a Workers’ Rights Unit during his first 100 days, targeting wage theft and workplace violations. The union hall was a place to solicit votes and make a specific enforcement commitment.

UNITE HERE reported more than 1.6 million doors knocked across 14 states in a November 3 release issued before election results. Its canvassers heard concerns about grocery prices, rent, gas, wages and deportations. The listed states stretched from established battlegrounds to Mississippi and Texas.

The outreach totals are union self-reports. They cannot be added together: doors knocked and voters reached are different measures, and the operations may have contacted some of the same people. Neither figure measures votes changed.

Skills that return to the workplace

UNITE HERE secretary-treasurer Nia Winston said canvassers would bring their experience back to contract fights and conversations with coworkers. President Gwen Mills said the union would expand organizing, including in places without strong union traditions. Those commitments extend beyond electing a preferred candidate.

In Michigan, the concrete commitment emerging from the canvass launch was Savit’s promised Workers’ Rights Unit. UNITE HERE’s leaders, meanwhile, said their members would carry the skills learned at doors back into contract campaigns. The next fights concern both enforcement by elected officials and workers’ ability to organize for themselves.