Profile: ACKERMAN: ‘REAL CHANGE IS FROM THE BOTTOM UP’
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
WASHINGTON (PAI)—For Karen Ackerman, in all her years in the labor movement, the key lesson – which she’s pushed politically – is that “real change comes from the bottom up.”
And that’s the point Ackerman is passing on to her to-be-named successor as AFL-CIO Political Director, as she voluntarily stepped down on March 18 after three election cycles and more than six years on the job. “I decided even before 2010 that it would be my last election cycle,” she says.
Ackerman, a Philadelphia native and former organizer for the Local 1199 Hospital and Health Care Workers, joined the AFL-CIO political department in 1996, after 4-1/2 years on Capitol Hill as campaign manager and top aide to Rep. Nydia Valezquez, D-N.Y. It was Ackerman’s only non-union position, she said in an interview with Press Associates, and she wanted to return to the labor movement.
After serving as AFL-CIO deputy political director for the 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004 election cycles, Ackerman succeeded former director Steve Rosenthal in 2005. She’s run the department ever since. Over those 15 years, she adds, labor has turned its political operation upside down – and she’s proud of that.
Before 1996, she says, labor left its politics in the hands of its state federations, which were more attuned to lobbying, and its central labor councils, “which had very little” in resources or expertise.
And the usual drill was that a politician would meet union leaders, discuss his or her voting record, seek and get an endorsement, be photographed shaking hands with the union president and receive campaign contributions from voluntary COPE committees. The message would go out, top-down, “to vote for so and so,” she added.
Workers didn’t want that, Ackerman said. They wanted information instead. Then they’d decide, from the bottom up, whom to back.
“We felt we had to reach our members where they work. That hadn’t been done before,” she stated.
First under Rosenthal and then even more so under Ackerman, the federation erected what she calls a national campaign “staffing structure.” It featured organized, targeted leafleting, phone banking, work site visits, home visits and more, with measurable and accountable goals for contacts with workers during an election cycle.
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Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) – 3/18/2011
(Ackerman profile, cont. –2)
Establishment of Working America, which reaches non-union workers and their families who could be brought around to agree with labor’s economic-oriented political program – if they knew about it – was a great help, Ackerman adds.
But the key, she said, was to put as much information as possible about issues -- especially economic issues – in the hands of workers and their allies, and then let them decide which candidates and hopefuls met labor’s qualifications and deserved labor’s votes. And Ackerman also decided to concentrate on battleground states.
It took some doing to convince the AFL-CIO’s member unions – as well as those of Change To Win, which broke away in 2005 – of the need to adjust the political program. Indeed, CTW’s leaders formed their new organization because they felt the fed was putting too much emphasis on politics and not enough on organizing.
“It was a delicate situation,” Ackerman admitted. “You have different affiliates with different structures, different traditions” and different ways of doing politics. “You have internal structures, so it’s pretty complicated.” But eventually, unions came around. That included CTW’s unions, which have worked in alliance with the AFL-CIO for the past two election cycles.
The result, over the 2006, 2008 and 2010 election cycles – the ones Ackerman has managed – has been what she calls a maximization of labor’s share of the U.S. electorate at 34%-26%. That’s double the union share of the nation’s workforce.
More importantly, the mountain of credible information and repeated contact with workers “by an institution they trust – their union” in campaigns produced turnout rates of 65%-70%, and 2-to-1 margins among voting unionists for labor-friendly candidates.
“No other institution in this country can do that,” Ackerman says with a smile.
Accomplishing all this has led to lots of weekend and late night work and lack of sleep for Ackerman who, except for her congressional service, has been with the union movement for around 40 years. She’s had highs and lows as political director.
The biggest high was the election of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. “Who among us, in our lifetimes, thought we’d see the election of an African-American as President of the United States?” she asks.
Not that Obama has been all that labor envisioned. “A big disappointment was not winning labor law reform,” Ackerman says of the failure of Congress to even consider the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining. A planned GOP filibuster stopped it.
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Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) – 3/18/2011
(Ackerman profile, cont. –3)
“The Democrats didn’t understand and Obama didn’t understand that for the corporate world, the #1 issue is to weaken unions. Democrats did not understand what could happen” for the better on many issues “if you change labor law.”
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“Many Democrats can’t stand up to the corporate world,” she says. That’s yet another reason for the shift to bottom-up information, she adds: It shows which hopefuls are really in labor’s corner – and which just say they are.
Ackerman said a low point was the Bush-Gore election of 2000, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court overruling Florida courts and letting Bush win the Sunshine State, and the election. “It was devastating,” both for how it happened and the resulting impact, Ackerman says.
“It set the course for the next decade, devastated the economy and immeasurably strengthened corporate America at the expense of working people,” she said of Bush’s eight years in the Oval Office.
For the future, Ackerman says labor must keep re-evaluating its political program, with a particular emphasis on coalition-building and outreach to progressive groups of students, African-Americans, Latinos, women, community organizations “and communities of color in general.”
But white working-class men, the traditional backbone of the union movement, will not be left behind, she promises. That’s important: Non-union white working class men have defected from pro-worker candidates in droves for years, especially in 2010.
“That’s where Working America is very important. It reaches out to those men in their own economic self-interest,” Ackerman says.
Ackerman adds her successor must seize the opportunity the current attack on workers state by state – with Ohio and Wisconsin in the lead – gives labor. The rank and file is energized and citizens now know of threats to rights and the middle class.
“These defensive battles open up opportunities to organize the workplace again,” says the one-time organizer, who still calls that her favorite job. “When working people are shoved up against the wall, they fight back.”
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