Good election news for labor in Texas

[billyoc]

Reports from the three large Texas cities which held local elections May 9 are good news for labor.

The Dallas AFL-CIO endorsed 6 candidates for City Council. Five of them won outright and the sixth goes into a runoff with the highest vote count. Far more interesting was labor’s call for a “no” vote on two propositions.

Proposition One came about when one of the city’s richest private hotel owners decided to stop city government from building a hotel. A “yes” vote for Proposition One was against the hotel and any future City efforts.

The other proposal was sponsored by the UNITE-HERE union after the mayor rebuffed their request for “card check” – the easier way to organize workers – for new hotel employees. A “yes” vote on their Proposition Two would have stipulated that anyone with 500 petition signatures could force an election to prevent the City from spending more than $1 million on any stimulation project. “Yes” on Proposition Two would have stopped the hotel and, according to Mayor Leppert, crippled city government for all time. UNITE-HERE is greatly respected among Dallas Latinos, but they failed to convince the rest of the labor movement to support them, and the Dallas Labor Council, looking at the economic crisis and the need for jobs, decided to support the city’s hotel.

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http://www.pww.org/article/view/15604/