Unions still big players in local politics

Ed Barnes, from left, Dave Ritchey and Cliff Leeper replace political signs after they were knocked down in East Vancouver on October 1. Union workers put in a lot of volunteer hours as well as monetary support for both local and national political campaigns. (ZACHARY KAUFMAN/The Columbian)

ORCHARDS — It’s 8 a.m. sharp, and the pickup trucks are lined up in the fog outside the Hometown Buffet. Inside, a 72-year-old man in an oversized Beavers jacket is calling things to order with a bottle of steak sauce.

Clunk! Clunk!

Harold Abbe, acting chair of the Labor Roundtable of Southwest Washington, smiles. “Thank you for coming out this morning,” he tells the crowd.

Halfway to the back of the little meeting room, County Treasurer Doug Lasher sits silently against the wall, making an appearance. Another table down, county commissioner candidate Pam Brokaw fiddles with her cell phone. Two dozen others — most of them men, most over 60 — scrape up the last of their scrambled eggs and French toast sticks. It could be any club.

A club that, if you happen to be a Democrat looking for elected office in Clark County, can be very, very valuable to belong to.

When Abbe was first hired at Camas’s paper mill, in the 1960s, Washington was the second most unionized state in the country, after Michigan: about 45 percent of its workers had union cards.

Today, Washington ranks fourth, after New York, Alaska and Hawaii. But the figure is now 20 percent.

What’s true of union workers, though, has not been true of union dollars. Paradoxically, even as union membership has collapsed, the remaining members’ political donations have swelled at every level of government.

Of U.S. Rep. Brian Baird’s top 20 donors, 18 are unions or their affiliates, according to the federal campaign watchdog open secrets.org. Tens of thousands of dollars flow from unions through state parties into Washington’s legislative campaigns in every even-numbered year. In Clark County’s own races, which aren’t subject to any campaign limits, labor’s favorite candidates — Brokaw is one — draw between a quarter and half their funding from unions.

It’s hard to estimate exactly how many union employees work in Clark County. But in the last eight years, only real estate developers have played a bigger role in financing the county’s politics.

“Like any other group,” said Mike Carnahan, secretary-treasurer of the Clark-Skamania-West Klickitat Central Labor Council, “we want to be important.”

And by that measure, of all the unions whose members gather two Fridays a month at the Hometown Buffet near the Vancouver mall, none is more important than — at $75,000 a year — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 48.

This is not an accident.

Setting down his makeshift gavel, Abbe asks all his attendees to introduce themselves. It’s a wide turnout — campaign professionals, past and present officers in the county Democratic Party, a Teamster up from Portland to ask for support in what he describes as a make-or-break strike.

Republicans almost never show up, members say. One of the few that did, county Auditor Greg Kimsey, is one of the few GOP politicians who’ve gotten IBEW money.

Only when Abbe gets to the soft-voiced, white-haired man at a crowded table at the middle of the room does he shout out the speaker’s name.

“Ed?”

In these meetings, Ed Barnes rarely requires introduction.

Seventy years ago, Barnes’s father was shot, twice, while trying to organize West Virginia mine workers. The family fled coal country for the West Coast, and Barnes grew up in Vancouver, eventually becoming an electrician on The Dalles Dam.

Over the next 20 years, he worked up the ranks of the IBEW’s volunteers, becoming its president in 1971 and joining its staff in 1980. In 1983, Barnes was elected business manager of the union for the Portland metropolitan area.

There, Barnes confronted a problem: political campaigns were getting more expensive.

At the time, it raised its money by asking members to donate rifles or televisions, then raffling them off.

So Barnes, who ran the electricians’ union until 1995, hatched a plan: as part of their contract, employers would sign up union workers for a contribution of 5 cents an hour to the union’s new political action committee.

If they asked to opt out, union workers could send the money to a charity instead. But if they said nothing, it would go right into the political fund.

Fundraising nearly doubled, Barnes said.

Marcus Widenor, a labor historian at the University of Oregon, said contracts like Local 48’s are rare.

They require, he said, a remarkably close relationship with management — one that Barnes and others forged with union contractors in the ’70s and ’80s.

“If you were to compare 48’s (contract) to the one closer to Seattle, it’d be very different,” Widenor said.

Joe Esmonde, Local 48’s political liaison, said the arrangement makes it far easier to persuade members to pony up for political contributions. He compared it to signing up for regular contributions to the United Way, rather than writing annual checks.

“It makes a huge difference,” Esmonde said. “You don’t feel it. You don’t see it.”

Barnes, Esmonde said, was “instrumental” in the innovation.

Denny Heck, a former five-term Democratic state representative from Vancouver who met Barnes in the early 1970s, agreed.

Today, if he were running for office again in Clark County, Heck said, Barnes’s group would be his first stop.

“Ed Barnes has been one of the most effective political figures in Clark County in the last generation,” Heck said.

The best recent example of the IBEW’s power in Clark County, post-Barnes, might be the 2006 race for Clark County clerk.

Races for clerk, whose main duty is to keep track of local court records, are usually a quiet affair. In 2002, incumbent Jo Anne McBride and challenger Mark Stratton each spent about $10,000 on the race.

Not so in 2006. Sherry Parker, McBride’s deputy, ran for the job, which pays $91,000 annually. So did Blaine Wilson, another employee in the office.

But Parker had an edge.

A Democrat, she poured more than $30,000 into the effort, $15,000 of it from the electricians’ union. That was exactly enough to pay for one of the most expensive tactics in Clark County elections: direct mail. Parker’s first printed fliers showed up in voters’ mailboxes alongside primary ballots.

Later, on Oct. 16, with Parker running low on money, the IBEW put in a final $3,000. She bought the stamps for her second set of pamphlets the same day.

No local politician, including Baird, got more money from electrical workers that year.

Wilson, meanwhile, raised a total of $13,000, enough for a Web site and a few newspaper ads.

In November, Parker won with 53 percent of the vote.

Parker’s link to the union? Her husband, Philip, is its vice president. He works with Barnes to dole out its money in Southwest Washington.

Philip Parker said Sunday that although he’s half of the two-person committee that hands out the IBEW’s political haul each year, he “kind of stayed a little bit out of that decision.”

Barnes, however, decided that local electricians would benefit from Sherry Parker becoming clerk, Philip Parker said.

“PAC 48 has had a historic run of supporting either electricians or electricians’ spouses who are running for office,” he added. “Ed tended to think she had good family values and would represent men and women well.”