WASHINGTON  - The AFL-CIO's executive council on Thursday gave final approval to a  plan to deploy at least 400,000 union members to work on the re-election  of President Obama, keeping the Senate out of the hands of the GOP and  taking the House back from Republican control.
The plan was announced here by Jeff Hausner, who emphasized he was speaking with the full authority of the labor federation.

If  unions succeed in deploying that number of volunteers, it will be what  one labor leader described as the "biggest army of ground troops we have  ever put out for an election." In 2008, when President Obama was  elected, unions turned out 250,000 volunteers nationwide.

In  addition to deploying more volunteer troops than last time, the  political plan approved by the executive council involves an organized  effort to reach more non-union members than ever before.

In  the key battleground states, Hauser said, the expectation is that the  number of non-unionists will exceed the number of people in unions who  are reached by the union election volunteers. Efforts to reach non-union  members will be carried out under the auspices of Workers' Voice, labor's new SuperPAC.
Worker's Voice is the labor movement's alternative to the multi-billion-dollar SuperPACs set up by big businesses and billionaires after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allowing unlimited  corporate spending on elections. Workers Voice will allow unions to  campaign among non-union members "but not with the millions of dollars  that the corporations have," Hauser said. "What we will have is the  ground troops, the boots on the ground."

People  in the AFL-CIO's political department hope that labor's edge in the  "ground game" will enable labor to defeat the big-spending business and  trade associations which have traditionally outspent unions by margins  of 10 to 1 during election campaigns.

In  another move, aimed specifically at denying Republicans a chance at  control of the Senate, the AFL-CIO executive council also voted Thursday  to add Massachusetts to its list of battleground states. The decision  was made because of the closeness of the race between Democratic nominee  Elizabeth Warren and incumbent GOP Sen. Scott Brown.

The  Brown-Warren race, a labor leader from Massachussetts said, "really  should not be this close, but it is. Brown makes himself look like he is  really an independent when we know that this is not true. He rides  around in a pickup truck making himself look like a friend of workers  while trying to portray Warren as an out-of- touch Harvard professor.  The opposite is true and we are going to make sure voters realize that." 
The other six batttleground states are Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Participants  in the executive council meeting made it clear that the labor movement  will not limit election activity to these seven states.

The  federation, its Working America affiliate and its SuperPAC, Workers  Voice, will be involved in 20 other states according to Hauser, who  noted that Working America, the federation's non-union affiliate, has  just added North Carolina and Minnesota to its list.

The  political plan approved Thursday also maps activity for union  volunteers in closely contested Senate races, including labor support  for endangered Democrats like Sherrod Brown, in Ohio, Claire McCaskill  in Missouri and Ben Nelson in Florida. In Nevada the unions will  mobilize for Democrat Shelley Berkley. They will push in Virginia for  Tim Kaine and in Wisconsin for Tammy Baldwin.

Also  part of the plan is an operation aimed at taking back from Republicans  more than the 27 seats need to wrest control of the House from the tea  party extremists. Unions will mobilize to protect endangered pro-worker  incumbents in some cases, Hauser said, and in other cases they will back  pro-worker individuals contesting for open seats.

article here:  http://www.peoplesworld.org/labor-to-mobilize-400-000-volunteers-fo...