How Labor Votes

Abstract

difficult, perhaps impossible, to measure precisely what effect the endorsement of a political candidate by union officials will have on the political thinking of the membership. But some evidence is at hand which, while far from conclusive, suggests that labor union members do not necessarily vote in blocs in response to appeals by the union, no matter how much they may respect the head of the union for other things and follow his lead unquestioningly in union affairs. A classic example was the dramatic effort made by John L. Lewis to influence the members of the Congress of Industrial Organizations when he bolted the Democratic ranks in 1940. At that time Mr. Lewis was head of the CIO which he had founded a few years before. In the 1940 presidential campaign he rejected Franklin D. Roosevelt and supported Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate. Toward the end of the campaign, Mr. Lewis announced that he would resign from the CIO if President Roosevelt were re-elected. The effect of this bold gesture on the rank and file of CIO members appears to have been negligible. After the election, when the American Institute of Public Opinion polled CIO members asking them how they had voted in the election, 79 per cent said they had cast their ballots for the candidate repudiated by their own union leader. Actually, Mr. Roosevelt got more support in that election from the membership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations than from that of the American Federation of Labor, whose leaders had favored the Democratic ticket all along. Even in the mining areas of Pennsylvania, seat of Mr. Lewis' power, his effort to switch votes to Mr. Willkie bore little fruit. Yet in union matters, the miners follow Mr. Lewis' discipline with remarkable unanimity.