Labor for Bernie Means Headaches for Hillary

The 35-person executive board of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees voted on Oct. 23 to endorse Hillary Clinton for president, the 10th national union to do so. “AFSCME members want the candidate who will be the most effective champion for working families and who will be able to deliver a victory in this critically important election,” Lee Saunders, the union’s president, said in a statement. The vote, he added, was based on polls of AFSCME’s 1.6 million members. “The majority of the people I talk to definitely are for Hillary,” says Julie Schultz, an Iowa parole officer who serves as president of her local.

Yet the vote did nothing to squelch enthusiasm among AFSCME members for Clinton’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. An hour or so before the AFSCME press release went out, a group calling itself Labor for Bernie e-mailed reporters a petition from AFSCME members asking the union to delay an endorsement. “An undemocratic decision at this time will only confirm what so many members already believe: that AFSCME is not an organization run by and for its members,” it said. Similar sentiments flooded AFSCME’s Facebook page.