This week in the War on Workers: Unions are about workers first

(DonkeyHotey based on a WWII poster)

Democrats and progressives who see labor as just another special interest to be tapped for funds during election season and then negotiated with (or more often, forgotten about) when it comes time to govern have forgotten ... that unions represent millions of working Americans, struggling under the weight of austerity policies and a stagnant economy, who are getting increasingly fed up with their treatment by politicians.

Sarah Jaffe's point here is one that's especially important as election season heats up. While unions are crucial to electing Democrats'at least, ones who will represent workers with some regularity'and while electing politicians who will support pro-worker legislation is crucial to unions' mission to represent their members, politics isn't most of what unions do.

'Most people's idea of a union is what we do politically. Let's face it, politics is now a 365-day-a-year sport, so that tends to get most of the focus. It's not sexy to talk about somebody's 4 percent raise or somebody who just got health care for the first time,' Jason Perlman of the Ohio AFL-CIO told AlterNet.

Most of those little victories -- those 4 percent raises and new contracts with health care benefits -- are won day by day, inch by inch, in grinding organizing campaigns and lengthy negotiations with management. They don't make headlines the way a multimillion-dollar ad buy does. As Perlman pointed out, unions are workers' organizations that do politics, not political organizations.

Unions aren't above criticism, of course, but it's important to remember in assessing their electoral work that electoral work is not what unions exist to do and that the Democratic party is not their top priority. They exist to represent working people'their members, people who might become their members, non-union workers in the industries they represent whose wages and working conditions are tied to those of union members. Their day-to-day work is in those "grinding organizing campaigns and lengthy negotiations with management," in representing members with grievances, making sure workers facing discipline get due process, in fighting for laws that will give working people, union and non-union, a little more power in the workplace.