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| There'll be plenty more of these signs tonight |
The Teamsters Local 20 union hall in Toledo will host a rockin' rally tonight for pro-worker candidates and issues. That means re-electing President Obama and Sen. Sherrod Brown and voting yes on Issue 2, which lets citizens draw Ohio's legislative districts. We'll have more about that later.
But in the meantime, Local 20 has been the staging area for union members who walk door to door and phone bank to get out the vote in this battleground state. Louis Nayman is one of those union members -- and the father of a Teamster. He's been writing about what it's like in the publication "In These Times." We thought we'd share some of his highlights from "Live from Battleground Ohio" dispatches.
First, a little bit about Toledo:
An inland port located at the mouth of the Maumee River on the far western shore of Lake Erie, Toledo made its bones as an automobile, glass and industrial center. Unionization led to the creation of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, solid middle class. Organized labor remains a powerful electoral presence in Ohio’s fourth largest city. Of the 240,000 votes that came out of Toledo’s Lucas County in the 2010 election, an estimated 40,000 were cast by union families.And about Local 20:
Getting into the Teamsters Local 20 building requires navigating a maze of yellow construction tape and orange cones set up to keep visitors from tracking in tar and wet blacktop from the newly paved parking lot. Outside, a contractor lays down diagonally striped parking spaces in a machine that looks like a beaten up Zamboni. The plan is to have the parking lot shipshape for Thursday evening’s rally, which will feature Teamster President Jim Hoffa and AFSCME President Lee Saunders. Some predict 1,000 or more union members will show up, maybe even double that number.Here's how hard these canvassers work (so be nice to them):
Mornings begin with phone banking at 10:00 a.m., followed by house visits from 1:00 p.m. until sundown, followed by debriefing and, if it’s not too late, more phone banking.
As Nayman sets out he looks around the union hall:
There are approximately a dozen and a half volunteers and staff sitting around the union hall tallying walk-lists or telephoning voters. More will be arriving later. The volunteers all appear to be in their fifties and sixties and seventies, while the full-time campaign coordinators directing them look to be in their twenties and thirties.
We could be their parents and grandparents.
If there’s hope for the future, I think, heading across the freshly paved Teamster parking lot to my rental SUV, this is how it’s going to look.He knocks on one door, and a serious woman with short blonde hair and a big dog answers:
She says that she and her husband were “small business people, but lost our business to the economy last year.” Her husband recently turned 62 and qualified to apply for early Social Security, which is now their main stable source of income. Now they’re waiting for him to become eligible for Medicare. She doesn’t feel like a victim or a charity case and doesn’t understand why anyone would think she’s either. Her husband’s a registered Republican, she’s an Independent, and she volunteers they’re both voting for Sherrod Brown and Barack Obama.And another:
Just up the street I knock at an address that’s home to a family of four registered voters, a potential goldmine. There’s a battered white Ford pick-up truck in the driveway and a U.S. Marine Corps decal affixed to a street-side front window....A thin man in his fifties, wearing a grey wool zippered jacket, eyes me suspiciously. I identify myself as a union volunteer and ask if he knows much about Issue 2. He doesn’t, but as we talk he remembers that it’s about fair redistricting. I cautiously ask about the candidates, and he volunteers that he and his entire family are voting for Obama and Brown. “We’re good Democrats,” he says. “You don’t have to worry about us.”You can follow Nayman's dispatches from Toledo at In These Times.
