Labor contemplates Obama presidency

With a month before the election, a top union leader and Obama ally is already cautioning others in labor not to ask for too many specific favors from President Obama.

In a memo to another labor official, John Wilhelm, a top official of the merged UNITE HERE hotel and textile workers unions, writes that labor should respond to an Obama presidency by launching a massive organizing campaign, but warns against "flood[ing] a new Obama administration with all sorts of proposals for regulatory changes, executive orders, appointments, etc."

Instead, Wilhelm writes in the September 18 memo to Tom Tom Woodruff, the director of the Strategic Organizing Center at the Change to Win federation of unions, labor should ask Obama to use his "bully pulpit" and a few key appointments to further the labor cause. (The memo was provided to Politico by a union official.)

The memo is a mark of how immediate the prospect of an Obama presidency feels to elemets of the Democratic Party, and how the jockeying has already begun for its favor. Wilhelm's was the first major labor union to endorse Obama, and ihs memo is seen by some as an attempt to head off the flood of demands Obama expects.

Wilhelm writes:

I disagree with the notion that we should flood a new Obama administration with all sorts of proposals for regulatory changes, executive orders, appointments, etc. To the contrary, I believe that we should have only one demand of an Obama administration: that the President of the United States publicly, repeatedly, and strenuously advocate that workers have Unions because Unions are necessary to build a good America; that he apply that advocacy to specific worker fights and not just general statements; and that he put people on the [National Labor Relations Board] and in his cabinet who share that view and are committed to implementing it. That is what would make a real difference. If we give a new adminsitration all sorts fo chocices, they won't choose the one thaing that matters most but would be the most daring from a politiciains point of view: the bully-pulpit and regulatory authority of the President of the United States consistently employed to grow unions.



Wilhelm also writes that he doesn't think the union should launch a "massive campaign" on the Employee Free Choice Act, a measure that would help organizing, but which he warns wouldn't be a "magic wand."