By Susan Zachem

The AFL-CIO plans to build on the momentum of its 1998 election efforts with a new $46 million program aimed at swelling grassroots mobilization on worker issues for the 2000 elections.

The federation's Executive Council approved the new program, along with resolutions detailing action plans on Social Security, Medicare, trade, and energy, during its February meeting in Miami Beach.

AFL-CIO Pres. John J. Sweeney explained the federation's reasoning behind the political outreach: "Politics and organizing are joined at the hip." He said "if you do good grassroots politics, you get the community support you need to organize."

The federation's political program involves keeping full-time AFL-CIO coordinators in 40 to 60 key districts to work with union affiliate coordinators and state federations and local councils. The coordinators will help develop education campaigns on worker issues, such as Social Security and the right to organize, voter registration drives, and links with community groups.

In addition, the federation is asking each union to name a coordinator in every congressional district to tie into the program.

The Executive Council passed a resolution urging affiliates to delay making endorsements for the 2000 elections until after this coordination effort helps pin down candidates on their stands on worker issues. The emphasis during the endorsement process will be on whether candidates are pro-worker, regardless of party, according to AFL-CIO leaders.

Other facets of the AFL-CIO's political program include the goal of registering nearly 3 million more voters from union households. Although unions registered more than a million new union voters since 1994, union registration is still only about 50 percent of eligible union household voters.

The federation's "2000 in 2000" program aims to enlist 2,000 union members to run for federal, state and local office in the 2000 election. In 1998, some 950 union members ran for political office and about 80 percent won their elections.

AFL-CIO Secy.-Treas. Richard L. Trumka told GCIU local leaders that, in addition to regaining the House and Senate and holding the White House, the federation is seeking to gain more worker power in governorships and state legislatures, where crucial redistricting will be done following the 2000 census.

GCIU Pres. James J. Norton, who serves on the AFL-CIO Executive Council, urged local unions and members to join in this effort by naming coordinators to work with the AFL-CIO coordinators and by volunteering to work on education, voter registration, and get-out-the-vote drives.

"We have to mobilize if we want to elect leaders who will work for working families," Norton said. "Legislators make a tremendous difference in our bargaining and organizing climates and, ultimately, in our standard of living. Now is our chance and we must accept the challenge."

GCIU General Board members at the March meeting approved paying $1 per United States member in 1999 and 2000 for AFL-CIO political education programs.

Among the political leaders addressing the AFL-CIO council were Democratic presidential candidates Vice Pres. Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), and House Minority Whip David Bonior (D-Mich.). Labor Secy. Alexis Herman and Transportation Secy. Rodney Slater also spoke to the council.

In other action, the Executive Council approved resolutions on:

• Social Security – The council pledged "to fight with renewed energy for a stronger and more secure Social Security system for the 21st century."

  The council scored the "unwise and reckless ideas" that would replace Social Security's guaranteed, lifelong benefits, cost-of-living adjustments, and disability and survivor benefits with "risky individual investment accounts" and require "huge, misguided cuts" in the program.

  Instead, the council endorsed President Clinton's plans to devote about 62 percent of the budget surplus over the next 15 years to Social Security, to improve benefits for elderly widows, and to raise the earnings limit. The council said that raising the cap on earnings subject to Social Security payroll tax would not only eliminate the remaining projected shortfall for the program after 2032, but also "would act as a progressive counterbalance to the growing wage inequality that has plagued working families for the past two decades."

• Medicare – The council endorsed Clinton's plan to devote 15 percent of the budget surplus to Medicare, which it said would provide time to develop a long-term strategy for the program that has served as "the cornerstone of health security for the nation's elderly." The council said Medicare needs "updating" to include coverage for prescription drugs and long-term care.

  The council strongly opposed the plan by Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), who co-chaired Congress' national Medicare commission. The Breaux plan would provide vouchers for seniors to use for either Medicare fee-for-service or private insurance coverage. The council said this plan would inflict the greatest hardships on the least healthy and low to moderate income seniors that the program was initially established to help.

• Trade and deindustrialization – The council said the financial crisis in Asia is spreading to other countries because "fundamentally flawed" global trade and investment schemes produce "speculative, hot money explosions and a relentless search for lower costs that devastate people, overturn national economies, and threaten the global economy itself."

  Washington's "consensus on 'economic reform' – trade and investment liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and extreme austerity – is a recipe for instability, social strife, environmental degradation, and growing inequality, not long-term growth, development, and broadly shared prosperity," the council said.

  The council said the growing U.S. trade imbalance is accelerating deindustrialization in the steel, textile, apparel, auto, electronics, aerospace, and other industries – eroding jobs and forcing down wages.

  The council said it will "strenuously oppose" any new or existing trade or investment agreements that do not support regulating the flow of speculative capital, strengthening worker rights and environmental standards, and correcting trade imbalances.

  The council called on Congress and the administration to correct flaws in NAFTA which it said led to trade inequities in the auto and apparel industries, the trampling of labor rights in Mexico, and the threat of unsafe Mexican trucks carrying goods into the United States. "NAFTA has been in place for five years now and has been a failure," the council said.

  The council also called on Congress and the administration to reconsider the most-favored nation trade status with China in light of that nation's recent imprisonment of scores of democracy and worker rights activists and its refusal to change its illegal trade practices, including an estimated $4 billion in textile transshipments.

• Energy – The council urged Congress and the administration to reconsider energy policies that "threaten to destabilize the electric utility industry, raise energy prices and cause unemployment" among utility workers. Policies cited by the council include electricity restructuring, the Kyoto Protocol to reduce pollutants destructive to the earth's protective ozone layer, and the relicensing of nuclear and hydroelectric facilities.

  The AFL-CIO stated its support for a policy of "fuel diversity in the electric utility industry" to maintain "all current generating options, including fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro and renewables, to ensure a stable, reliable, and low-cost supply of electricity."