Public backs unions; knock out governor's anti-labor measures

A black eye. That’s what the November 2005 elections delivered to the “conservative agenda” across the country, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. And AFT members played a critical role in getting voters in their communities to throw the last punch—their votes.

For the AFT, no victory was harder won than the wall-to-wall defeat of ballot initiatives backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that sought to weaken public services and undermine the rights of public employees across the board—teachers, state employees, nurses, fire fighters and peace officers.

The election outcome was a victory for AFT members—and the labor movement—nationwide, says AFT president Edward J. McElory. “This was a defeat for a cynical attempt by the right-wing to rewrite the rules affecting all workers in the public sector with a public relations campaign rather than through a deliberative, democratic process.

“If they had succeeded, others across the country would have mounted similar efforts to repeal the hard-won protections and benefits enjoyed for many years by our nation’s public employees,” notes McElroy.

By Election Day, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s initiative agenda had been scaled back. Earlier in the year, he had planned to take his public employee pension privatization scheme to voters. Nevertheless, initiatives that made it on the ballot would have given the governor unprecedented control over determining spending priorities for the state budget; weakened due-process rights for public school teachers; and limited the access of public employees to the political process through their unions.

“Gov. Schwarzenegger read the wrong script, and he was appealing to the wrong audience,” says McElroy. “His agenda may have reflected the values of his nationwide donor base but it was not representative of the majority of people living and working in California.”

Collective action—period—among the AFT’s California Federation of Teachers, other public employee unions and organizations led to the victory, reinforcing that grassroots action can knock out ill-conceived public policy any day.

For nearly one year, union members relentlessly dogged the governor, staging spirited rallies outside his high-dollar fundraisers; and they wore out shoe leather meeting with voters in their communities educating them on how Gov. Schwarzenegger’s attacks on public employees were part of a larger national agenda to undermine the income security of working Americans, eliminate workers’ rights and silence the voice of working families in the political process.

Based on the number of votes cast, the teacher due-process measure and the initiative to shut public employees out of the political process drove voter turnout, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. These initiatives shared ballot space with a measure that would have redefined abortion as the taking of human life and would have required a waiting period and parental notification for minors seeking abortions. Because more votes were cast on the due-process and workers’ rights measures, the center’s post-election analysis concludes that basic populist issues trumped what many believe to be the voting public’s driving issue—abortion.

Voters in other states, including Colorado, Ohio, Maine, New Jersey and Washington, also went to the polls in November.

“Whether is was anti-government, anti-civil rights, anti-worker or anti-choice measures, voters [nationwide] let us know that this kind of overreach will not be tolerated,” according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. (The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center’s election recap is available at www.ballot.org.)