Union loyalties could determine Philly's next mayor

The city's television airwaves will be packed for the next six weeks with campaign commercials about mayoral candidates.

But that air war is just half the effort needed to win the May 19 Democratic primary election.

The other half?

That's the ground game known as GOTV, for "get out the vote."

That means waves of people on the streets to distribute campaign literature, talk up candidates, and, on Election Day, bang on doors to remind voters to cast their ballots.

Enter the unions.

Organized labor has long been a reliable provider of political manpower in Philadelphia elections.

But is labor united this year, or again splintered?

It's complicated.

Former City Councilman Jim Kenney, a late entry in the mayor's race, quickly picked up momentum with more than 30 labor endorsements, including unions representing city police, firefighters, teachers, and blue-collar and white-collar workers.

Kenney, who held union restaurant and hospital jobs while in college, said "organized labor wanted to speak with one voice" in this election after splitting support among candidates in the 2007 race for mayor.

That left the unions, Kenney said, "so splintered they were meaningless."

Mayor Nutter exploited that division to win the 2007 Democratic primary.

Still, there are cracks this year in the union solidarity for Kenney.

State Sen. Anthony H. Williams, another Democrat in the race, has drawn support from union carpenters, sheet metal workers, laborers, operating engineers, and transit workers.

Speaking after the Laborers District Council endorsed him Thursday, Williams called Kenney's union supporters "special interests" who had been casting about for "someone who would wed themselves whole cloth to a union narrative."

"I was never that person they were going to pick," Williams said, adding that to the unions it didn't matter whether it was Kenney or some other candidate.

That's not the way John Dougherty remembers it.

Dougherty, business manager of the politically active Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Williams sought the endorsement of the local AFL-CIO, which boasts more than 100 unions with nearly 200,000 members.

"Tony wanted that support," Dougherty said. "They were lobbying us all the way up to the vote."

Kenney on March 18 won the AFL-CIO endorsement.

It was a significant political bounce back for Kenney from four years ago, when a vote he cast against a controversial retirement program cost him labor support and nearly his reelection to Council.

Kenney's father, a retired firefighter, considered resigning from his union. Son persuaded father to let it pass.

Pat Eiding, president of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO, predicted union solidarity would result in a substantial GOTV effort for Kenney.

"It's about people putting feet on the street," Eiding said. "It's about phone banks."

Eiding also said Williams didn't give unions enough credit for the way they vetted candidates.

"Maybe Jim Kenney has been a little closer to the people in Philadelphia than Sen. Williams gives him credit for, and maybe he's been in Harrisburg too long," Eiding said.

Dougherty aired the most likely union line of attack against Williams: claiming the five-term state senator is beholden to the three founders of the investment firm Susquehanna International Group, who are pushing for more charter schools and school vouchers and the use of public school money for private school tuition.

"Zillionaires with a 'z' " is how Dougherty refers to Joel Greenberg, Jeff Yass, and Arthur Dantchik, the trio of Main Line financial traders who invested $5 million in Williams' 2010 campaign for governor.

They now back American Cities, an independent political action committee already spending heavily to run pro-Williams commercials on television.

Dougherty cited campaign contributions the trio has made to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a potential Republican contender for president whose two terms in office have been marked by prolonged battles with his state's public unions.

Williams on Thursday pushed back on the school voucher issue, noting that the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers had endorsed Kenney even though he supported vouchers while on Council in 1996.

Kenney has dropped his support for vouchers.

Kenney campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt describes the 1996 voucher effort as a deal he tried to make to secure more state funding for Philadelphia's public schools.

Hitt responded to Williams' comments about Kenney being beholden to unions by saying they are made up of working families a mayor should represent, and "not three pro-voucher billionaires who live on the Main Line."

Just below the surface of the mayor's race is a simmering union feud that has nothing to do with billionaires or schools or public safety or other issues and is instead all about the Convention Center.

Union carpenters and Teamsters lost their slice of the labor payday at the center in May when they missed a deadline to sign on to new work rules.

Local 98 and other unions did sign - and crossed the picket lines of the exiled unions.

That split is reflected in the mayor's race, with Williams supported by the unions who lost work, and Kenney by the unions that kept working.

The notion of labor pulling together in this race has been on Local 98's mind for some time. The local has hosted monthly meetings of labor unions - absent the carpenters and Teamsters - for two years, trying to find a candidate they could unify behind.

City Council President Darrell Clarke and City Controller Alan Butkovitz were discussed as candidates.

Both passed on this year's race for mayor.

Kenney's union support made a splash last month.

Building a Better Pennsylvania Fund, an independent political action committee funded by building trades unions, including Local 98, became the first group to air television commercials in the mayor's race.

That PAC's federal arm last year helped boost U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle, a Northeast Philadelphia Democrat, to victory in a four-way primary election.

The coalescing of unions behind candidates - more for Kenney, some for Williams - is a serious change from four years ago.

The city's union firefighters and blue-collar workers in 2011 endorsed former State Sen. T. Milton Street's challenge to Mayor Nutter's bid for a second term - notwithstanding the fact that Street was still under federal supervision during the primary after having served 26 months in prison for unpaid taxes.

Those endorsements were seen as a protest of Nutter's policies toward city unions. Street, who is running for mayor again this year, won 24 percent of the 2011 primary vote.

Street and the other current Democratic candidates for mayor - former District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham, former Common Pleas Court Judge Nelson Diaz, and former PGW executive Doug Oliver - have no labor endorsements so far.

So the unions are united, except when they're at odds, behind one candidate for mayor or another.

215-854-5973 @byChrisBrennan