Unions Take Kerry Message Door to Door; Candidate's Stance on Jobs Touted to Dwindling Number of Factory Workers in Pa.
The Erie Labor Temple is an old, proud building that stands in the middle of downtown State Street, its location, like its name, proof of a time when unions lorded over the city. People still talk about the days when 15,000 union members worked at the General Electric locomotive plant -- more workers than all of the plants combined currently employ in Erie County.</br></br>Saturday morning at the temple, AFL-CIO organizers set out doughnuts and coffee and held a meeting for workers willing to give up half a weekend to save union jobs. Their task would be to knock on members' doors to get the word out that this year's presidential election is crucial for jobs and health care, not to mention that the Democrat, Sen. John F. Kerry, is their friend. The hope was that 40 to 50 workers might show up.</br></br>Instead, 90 people crowded a meeting room with faded walls and warped floors. They included steelworkers and carpenters, construction workers and assembly line crews, and people whose jobs were outsourced. Everyone seemed excited, but serious, about being part of the earliest, biggest, on-the-ground get-out-the-vote operation the AFL-CIO has ever mounted -- with more than 100 walks in 72 cities in 16 states during the four Saturdays in June.</br></br>"We're hitting more than 400,000 union households in Pennsylvania in June because this November is that important to us," David Keicher, a national field representative for the AFL-CIO's Northeast region, told the workers. He had brought a few foot soldiers from his home base in Buffalo, 89 miles away, and promised more next Saturday.</br></br>With Pennsylvania on everyone's list of key battleground states (President Bush has visited here more than two dozen times -- more frequently than any other state besides his own Texas), the workers knew that Republican groups are mounting their own walks. And, yes, they had heard that every political group in the country seems to have decided to go back to campaigning door to door.