U.S. unions ready to push new laws if Dems win big

By Nick Carey

CHICAGO (Reuters) - If the Democrats hold both houses of the U.S. Congress and take the White House in the 2008 elections, America's struggling unions plan to trade their political support for a raft of labor-friendly bills.

"It's early to say but if the Democrats were to take the presidency," as well as Congress, said Bill Samuel, legislation director of the AFL-CIO labor federation, "this could be an opportunity for historic change."

Analysts say Big Labor will push for legislation to make forming unions easier, restrict free-trade pacts, raise corporate taxes and reform the creaking health-care system.

"There is a real threat the Democrats may take the White House and extend their majorities in the House and Senate with the support of the unions," said Brian Darling, a congressional analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

"In return, the Democrats would push measures like another minimum wage hike or no new free trade agreements that would be bad for the U.S. economy," Darling said.

"We are at a pivotal moment where the American people want to provide security and jobs for the next generation," said Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union.

Like the 10-million-member AFL-CIO, the 1.9-million-member SEIU says it is planning the "biggest mobilization" in the U.S. labor movement's history ahead of the 2008 elections.

NO. 1 ON WISH LIST: NEW MEMBERS

Falling membership is one of Big Labor's biggest worries. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that union membership -- public and private unions -- fell to 12.5 percent of the U.S. work force in 2005 from 20.1 percent in 1983.

Ken Goldstein, labor economist at The Conference Board, a corporate network, calls that downward trend irreversible.

"The days when the unions represented one in four or five American workers are gone for good," he said. "Legislation won't help. What the unions need is to overcome office workers' hostility to joining a union."

But unions cite evidence such as a December 2006 national survey by Peter Hart Research indicating that 53 percent of U.S. workers -- 60 million -- would join a union if they could.

Unions claim a big reason is a broken system for forming unions, which they say intimidates and discourages organizing.

The remedy, they say, has already been introduced -- and is stuck -- in Congress: the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

This bill would make it easier for workers to unionize using the "card check" system: they could form a union by signing a card rather than, as now, holding a vote.