By DON McINTOSH, Associate Editor
Barack Obama was not the labor movement’s first choice for
president. Some unions initially backed John Edwards. Others supported
Hillary Clinton. But now Obama, the junior U.S. senator from Illinois,
is the Democratic nominee. And no union in America wants to see
Arizona’s Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain in the White House.
That’s because on organized labor’s most important issues
— trade, health care, and workers’ rights — Obama’s
proposals and his brief legislative record are without question
more appealing than McCain’s.
Obama, 47, began political life in 1985 as a community organizer
on the south side of Chicago, where he helped residents win a youth
summer jobs program and asbestos removal. He was elected to the
Illinois State Senate in 1996, lost a 2000 run for Congress, won
his 2004 race for the U.S. Senate, and announced his campaign for
U.S. president in 2007. That gives him a very short legislative
career to analyze, but AFL-CIO officials in Illinois and Washington,
D.C., like what they see.
The Illinois AFL-CIO gave Obama a 90 percent rating for his eight
years as an Illinois state senator. His rating would have been higher
if he hadn’t missed a vote on a bill pushing greater corporate
accountability, said Illinois AFL-CIO spokesperson Dana Kennedy.
But Kennedy said Obama was very accessible to organized labor while
in Springfield, and supported bills when asked. Obama voted for
state laws that: raised the minimum wage; protected overtime pay;
made it easier for public workers to unionize; made it harder for
employers to use temporary workers as strikebreakers; gave unemployment
benefits to workers locked out in labor disputes; and tightened
enforcement of the requirement that workers be paid the prevailing
wage on public construction contracts. Obama also supported public
financing for major construction projects that put union members
to work, including ethanol plants, downtown Chicago’s McCormick
Place, and a $9 billion expansion of O’Hare International
Airport.
The 2008 presidential election is the first in U.S. history in which
the leading contenders are both sitting U.S. senators. That fact
means they have a voting record that can be compared side by side.
Since Obama began serving in the Senate in 2005, he and McCain were
on opposite sides on vote after vote. Obama voted to increase the
minimum wage; McCain voted repeatedly against it. Obama voted no
on getting rid of the tax on wealthy estates; McCain voted yes.
Obama also voted no on a bill to eliminate — for federally-funded
bridge projects — the “Davis-Bacon” requirement
that contractors pay prevailing wage. McCain missed that vote, but
has voted against Davis-Bacon before. In 1996, he voted against
a symbolic resolution supporting Davis-Bacon, and in 1999, he voted
to eliminate Davis-Bacon on disaster-relief projects.
The national AFL-CIO gives Obama a 98 percent rating, and McCain
16 percent.
McCain, 72, often mentions the five-and-a-half years he spent as
a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. McCain’s father and grandfather
were admirals in the U.S. Navy. As a Navy pilot with the rank of
lieutenant commander, McCain flew bombing raids over Hanoi until
he was shot down in 1967 and taken prisoner. He suffered torture
at the hands of his captors, and like hundreds of his fellow servicemen,
refused offers to release him early if he would make statements
against the United States.
Most union members respect McCain’s service in the armed forces.
But his service in the Senate has a plainly-marked anti-union bent.
In 1996, for example, McCain supported a bill that would have made
the entire country “right-to-work.” The term “right-to-work”
would be more accurately spelled out as the “right to work
under a union contract without having to pay any share of the costs
of union representation.” Right-to-work comes from a provision
of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, which says states
can pass laws banning union contracts that require workers to pay
union dues as a condition of employment. Twenty-two states, mostly
in the South, are right-to-work, and generally those states are
where unions are weakest. In McCain’s “right-to-work”
Arizona, for example, less than 9 percent of workers belong to unions.
McCain also voted against the Employee Free Choice Act, labor’s
top priority, which would make it easier for workers to unionize
and get a first contract, and would crack down on employer abuse
of workers’ rights. Obama voted for the Employee Free Choice
Act, and has promised to sign it into law if elected president.
McCain came to be known as a “maverick” Republican mainly
because his best-known achievement in the Senate is a campaign finance
reform law that was opposed by most of his fellow Republicans. McCain
became a campaign finance reform advocate after he was tainted in
the “Keating Five” scandal. In the 1980s, he was one
of five U.S. senators who intervened with federal regulators on
behalf of Lincoln Savings & Loan — after having received
sizable campaign contributions from Lincoln executive Charles Keating.
Keating went to jail; McCain got a rebuke from the Senate Ethics
Committee for bad judgment. After that, McCain spoke out against
the influence of big money in politics, and co-sponsored a bill
with Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold. It finally passed in 2002,
and it limits campaign contributions to political parties.
McCain also showed an independent streak when he opposed the 2001
and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which gave the biggest cuts to the wealthiest
taxpayers. The cuts lowered the top marginal income tax rate (the
nominal rate paid on income above $300,000 a year) from 39.6 percent
to 35 percent. [For comparison, the top income tax rate was 91 percent
during the Eisenhower Administration, the era of America’s
greatest growth.] But McCain has since changed his position, and
now he wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. What does that
mean? The Bush tax cuts were set to expire after 10 years as an
accounting gimmick to get around a balanced budget law that is supposed
to force cuts in government if Congress doesn’t come close
enough to balancing the budget. The Bush tax cuts led to the biggest
federal budget deficits in U.S. history.
Obama has said he wants to repeal the tax cuts on the wealthy but
keep the parts of the Bush cuts that reduced taxes for low and middle-income
taxpayers.
On trade, McCain voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) in 1993 and for every subsequent NAFTA-style trade treaty,
including CAFTA, which created a free trade area for five Central
American countries plus the Dominican Republic. Labor union leaders
say the treaties grease the skids for corporations to offshore U.S.
manufacturing jobs.
Obama voted against CAFTA, but he voted for a NAFTA-style free trade
agreement with the Gulf state Oman in 2006. On the campaign trail,
he has said he would consider renegotiating NAFTA to strengthen
labor and environmental commitments. Some doubt was cast on that
pledge by a leaked memo describing a private meeting in which Obama’s
senior economic policy adviser told the Canadian ambassador that
Obama’s NAFTA-bashing “should be viewed as more about
political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”
But even if that’s the case, Obama is nowhere near the ardent
free-trader that McCain is, or that President Bill Clinton was when
he fought for passage of NAFTA against the majority of congressional
Democrats.
On health care, no major legislation has passed Congress since Obama
joined the Senate. But Obama’s and McCain’s campaign
proposals on health care are worlds apart.
Obama proposes requiring all children to be insured, and allowing
individuals and small businesses to buy into a new national health
plan that is similar to what members of Congress get. Large employers
that don’t already provide health benefits would have to pay
something to support the program. Small businesses would get a tax
credit reimbursing half the cost of providing health insurance to
employees. Obama also wants to see a government watchdog agency
set up to regulate and evaluate private insurance company offerings.
And he proposes to make it legal for Americans to import prescription
drugs from countries where government action keeps the price affordable.
McCain, on the other hand, is proposing to end the tax rules that
encourage employers to offer health care. Instead, McCain wants
government to offer tax credits to encourage individuals to buy
private health insurance for catastrophic expenses and set aside
money in special savings accounts to pay for routine medical expenses.
McCain has also said he supports privatization of Social Security
along the lines Bush proposed in 2001. Obama opposes that.
“America’s voters are faced with a fundamental choice,”
said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney in a Labor Day press statement,
“to continue down the road we’ve taken and end up in
a swamp of inequality where corporations and the wealthy always
get more — or to turn around America and ensure health care
for all, fair trade, the freedom to improve our lives through unions,
and a fair share of the wealth that working people create.”
“Senator Barack Obama has a record of putting communities
— not corporations — first, and helping average people
get our fair share,” Sweeney said. “Senator John McCain
plans to continue the Bush record of putting corporate profit over
working families’ needs.”
The two candidates will face off in three televised presidential
debates, scheduled for Sept. 26, Oct. 7, and Oct. 15. The election
will be decided Nov. 4.
