Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 14, 1990 TAG: 9005140182
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Less is what they have gotten lately.
Union membership has been declining; businesses have been bolder about challenging union demands and facing down strikes; and some contracts during the 1980s even contained givebacks, or union concessions to management. Gompers would be aghast.
This ill fortune makes the leaders of organized labor all the more fascinated by the outcome of the Southwest Virginia coalfields dispute last year. Not only did the United Mine Workers win a long strike against Pittston, in what many unionists viewed as a last-ditch struggle against the company to save the union.
During the strike, a UMW local president, Jackie Stump, also won a write-in campaign in Buchanan County for the Virginia General Assembly.
Union leaders across the country are looking for lessons for labor from the Pittston experience. One thing they've decided they want is more union members running for public office.
On his speaking tours, Vic Fingerhut, a Washington political consultant who worked on Stump's campaign, always gets asked about Stump. Union people, Fingerhut says, "immediately see the significance" of that victory. All of them, he adds, have helped elect candidates they thought would support labor interests but instead "end up in the hip pocket of the company."
In Virginia, the rooting for more Stumps is on in earnest. The AFL-CIO is conducting a computer study of precincts to determine where union workers and retirees live. The organization thinks that it could be most successful in backing union members as candidates in Northern Virginia and Tidewater, but that the Roanoke Valley and some other Southwestern Virginia communities might also prove fertile territory.
This is a democracy, and by law we have an open political process. People from all walks of life may run for public office, and they may have the support of all manner of special-interest groups. That includes candidates and groups who hold the interests of unions and businesses to heart.
But the ideal of representative government in this country is not that factions and interest groups should elect representatives to pursue their particular goals in office. Public servants are to represent all their constituents. By their votes or other actions, officials are bound to please some and displease others. But they are not supposed to act as lobbyists for any special interest, which is what union leaders apparently want from the candidates they're seeking now.
Design is one thing, of course, practice another. The political process does not work as it should: Money talks and, as Fingerhut observes, some elected officials wind up in the hip pocket of powerful and moneyed interest-groups. Their tenure, however, is up to the voters, who have an opportunity to observe whether officials' actions generally conform with their wishes. The answer is not to elect people who will be in the hip pocket of organized labor.
The AFL-CIO could learn another lesson from the Stump experience. His colleagues in the House of Delegates say that during his freshman term this year, he was well-informed on all bills and businesslike in reviewing them.
Deskmate J. Jack Kennedy, D-Norton, said Stump "shattered the stereotype. . . . [Everyone] figured he came down here prepared to repeal the right-to-work law." But Stump never made a point of his labor orientation. Instead, it appears he has worked for all his constituents.
As well he should. As a delegate, that's his job.
by CNB