United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 are organizing the campaign workers for Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-Vt., presidential campaign, but they are not endorsing his bid.
The union can’t, in fact, because it has to represent the interests of the workers and not management, even though the workers all presumably want Sanders to win. In fact, the union will even push for the workers’ having the right to go on strike against the campaign.
“We cannot look that far ahead right now, but I will say that we are not barred from any kind of concerted activity, including strikes,” UFCW Local 400 spokesman Jonathan Williams told the Washington Examiner when asked whether it would agree to a “no strike” clause in the contract, which has yet to be written. He adds that relations between the union and campaign have been “amicable” so far.
The question of striking is just one of the unusual issues raised by the UFCW’s representation of the Sanders campaign staff, which was announced late last week. There will be several others they’ll have to work out.
“It is the first time in history it has ever happened. There are no past contracts from presidential campaigns to work from,” Williams said. The arrangement is so new, Williams said, that he is not even sure what the staffers’ concerns are yet.
For now, the union is just playing it straight, he said. “We are treating this campaign just like any other employer,” he said. “We are here for these workers and to represent their interests, and that is the bottomline.”
A Sanders campaign spokesman could not be reached for comment. “We cannot just support unions with words, we must back it up with actions,” Sanders tweeted Friday.
Presidential campaigns are notoriously demanding, high-pressure affairs that are hard on their staff. Employees are expected to work long, irregular hours, have their duties changed, and work sites moved at short notice, and can be laid off with little warning.
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That’s the type of environment that collective bargaining in theory exists to redress, said Rachel Gumpert, spokeswoman for the hospitality industry union Unite Here, which is not involved in organizing any campaigns.
“Political campaigns are famously exploitative of the lowest paid workers, who often work extreme workloads and hours out of their dedication to the candidate,” Gumpert said. “One common issue candidate campaign staffers face is a lack of paid time off — which often includes no weekends off and no vacation/sick days.”
And sexual harassment has been an increasingly high profile problem for campaigns in recent years, Gumpert said. “It has a history of receiving inadequate responses from both major political party and their corresponding campaign arms,” she said. “Unionizing is a great step to address that.”
But even liberal, pro-union candidates have rarely discussed organizing campaign workers. For one thing, the campaigns are by definition temporary, rarely existing for more than two years, and unions flourish mostly in more stable work environments.
Wilma Liebman, former chairwoman of the National Labor Relations Board, said that just because organizing a campaign staff is novel, there’s no reason why it cannot be done.
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“Collective bargaining can be very flexible and adapted to the parties’ needs,” said Liebman, now senior research associate at Harvard Law School’s labor and worklife program. “Some contracts are lengthy, spelling out detailed rules and procedures. Some are just a few pages long, setting out just basic values and principles.”
Liebman said, though, that she wasn’t sure what the Sanders campaign staff contracts would and would not include.
For example, would the same union be allowed to represent workers in separate campaigns, or would that create a conflict? Gumpert said that the issue could come up, especially in the primaries.
Now that the Sanders campaign has created the precedent, such scenarios may not be far-fetched for long. Williams says the approach they used to organize Sanders presidential campaign staff can be a model for other presidential campaigns, and indicated that that might be tested soon.
“I don’t think it’s a mistake that Sen. Sanders’ campaign was the first, but there’s no reason it needs to be the last,” he said. “In fact, we see the neutrality agreement we signed with management and the card check approach we used as models for other presidential campaigns.”
Asked if Local 400 was actually trying to organize the other campaigns, Williams declined to comment.
