Ackerman mobilizes labor unions to put a Democrat in the White House
WASHINGTON -- Labor-intensive.
That's an apt description of the life and work of Karen Ackerman, who for 30 years -- from her days as a student organizer at Temple University in her native Philadephia to her current post as the AFL-CIO's political director -- has been passionate in bringing about change through the labor movement.
The stakes have never been higher nor has the responsibility been greater, said Ackerman, commander of a 20-month, $35-million union campaign committed to setting the country on a different course and replacing George W. Bush with a Democratic president in 2004.
"We are very focused on the presidential election," said Ackerman, 56, who has an unobstructed view of the White House from her seventh-floor office at AFL-CIO headquarters near Lafayette Park. "This is the most antiworker, antiunion administration we have ever seen, and workers' selfinterest depends on changing who is in the White House."
Of the constituencies loyal to the Democratic Party, none has the money, the manpower, or the institutional discipline of organized labor. The candidates are scrambling for endorsements from national and local unions that guarantee ground troops and aggressive get-out-the-vote efforts. In the 2000 presidential election, 26 percent of the total vote came from union households, though only 11 percent of Americans belong to unions.
It's a fairly recent development for the AFL-CIO, the federation of 64 unions with 13 million members, to direct voter outreach from Washington. With a mission to inform, involve, and engage union workers in the 2004 elections, Ackerman has assigned political coordinators to each union, has conducted focus groups and polls to identify issues and undecided voters, and is ready to launch an extensive voter-registration drive early next year.
Eventually, she will lead union members knocking on doors, stuffing envelopes, and staffing telephone banks for the Democratic nominee in at least a dozen battleground states and decide how best to spend the AFL-CIO's war chest.
Labor leaders say Ackerman is creative and capable, but she recently got into hot water for observing that it would be a "heavy lift" for Democrats to win control of the House next November. Nancy Pelosi, who leads the House Democrats, called AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney to her office to complain that Ackerman's remark was a demoralizing no-confidence vote from organized labor.
"My comment didn't reflect that we would not be supportive of all House and Senate candidates who stand with workers on their issues," Ackerman said.
Ackerman is no political novice; in the early 1990s, she helped elect and then spent five years working on Capitol Hill for Representative Nydia Velazquez, a New York Democrat. But Ackerman's heart was in organized labor: In 1996 she moved to the AFL-CIO as deputy political director and in March became a female boss in a male-dominated organization.
"It's a surprise to those who tend to see politics as cigar-chomping and sharp elbows and wheeling-dealing, and that is certainly not the image for a woman," said Ackerman, whose job requires activities where she is frequently the only female.
A veteran labor organizer, Bob Muehlenkamp, said: "Karen gets it. She knows where the labor movement should be on the issues and how it should mobilize the grass roots." Ackerman, who remains neutral until the AFL-CIO makes an endorsement, denies it's causing any heartburn that Muehlenkamp, her husband of 28 years, is working for Howard Dean, the presidential candidate from Vermont. 