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Union leaders tee off on Obama

It makes me sad to read things like this, from Politico:

Top labor leaders excoriated President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a closed session of the AFL-CIO's executive board meeting in Washington Wednesday, three labor sources said.

Furious union presidents complained about budget cuts, a new trade agreement and what some view as their abandonment, even by their typically reliable allies among Senate Democrats.

Now, not only are we getting screwed by the Republicans but the Democrats are doing it too," said one union official, characterizing the mood at a summit of labor leaders who are worried that Democrats seem unlikely to go to the mat for them as an election year approaches...

...A case in point: The AFL released yesterday a deliberately measured statement on the budget.

"President Obama does not yet have the balance right between spending cuts and new revenue," said President Richard Trumka calling for "significant new revenues." Last week, the federation released a stronger, "deeply disappointed" statement on the free trade pact with Colombia.

I don't blame them. They spend many millions electing Democrats and then Democrats do very little for them. Not nothing: Democratic presidential administrations always appoint better, pro-union people to the National Labor Relations Board, make certain administrative changes that make it easier for people to try form unions, and put people in charge of investigations like the one into the West Virginia explosion that killed 29 men who are actually qualified to lead such investigations, instead of absurd corporate shills as Republicans tend to.

The unions' problem is that they have loads of clout inside the Democratic Party, because they spend millions electing Democrats, but virtually no clout outside of it. Come to think of it, they may not even have that much clout in the Democratic Party. They have clout within it during election time. During legislation time, they have rather little. Remember when some people thought card-check legislation might actually happen? Geez...

Even so, this kind of thing, a public rebuke of a Democratic president by a union leader, is fairly rare. The problem unions face is that they can't sit out elections, because that would weaken them even further: if, for example, they ditched the Dems and ran a third-party candidate, they wouldn't even get the crumbs they're passed now. And remember, Trumka stuck his neck out for Obama. It wasn't too easy for a guy who represents a bunch of miners to lecture them about racism, as he did, and make a passionate case for Obama.

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