Organizing Unemployed Voters
Working America has been focusing on unemployment a lot for more than a year now, from the Unemployment Lifeline to tele-town halls to field organizing to our steady stream of actions in favor of job creation and unemployment aid extensions. And now that we’re coming up on elections, it’s time to think about unemployment as an electoral issue.
Which we’re doing with a campaign, covered today by the Huffington Post, to get our unemployed members to vote, knowing where the candidates stand on this issue specifically.
The organization is starting with 100,000 of its own members who are currently out of work. But the list of contacts could wind up being “several hundred thousand” of the nearly 15 million unemployed, said Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America. In Ohio alone, Nussbaum said, Working America has a list of 38,000 unemployed workers who are registered to vote — a major bloc that could tip the scale of the governor’s race as well as elections to the House or the Senate.
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The effort, which is the first of its kind, is an ambitious effort to re-balance the political landscape away from pro-corporate, pro-business interests. But will the unemployed vote for the candidates Working America supports? Democrats, after all, have presided over the past year-and-a-half of an epic jobs crisis and it’s not unreasonable to expect the jobless won’t be drawn to their candidacies.
“Our experience as we go door to door is that people are looking for an explanation about why this is happening to them,” said Nussbaum when asked about a potential Democratic backlash. “The knee-jerk response to get mad at people that are in power is in the absence of having a better explanation. You can talk about who’s standing in the way of investing in jobs. The fact that corporations have way too much influence in government, that makes sense to people, and that when you compare voting records, when you look at for example a Republican bloc that has voted against every single jobs bill, including this unemployment extension, that’s information people take in and act on.”
Tags: unemployment
The way this country is sending money overseas, we need to take care of the ones here in America. We need to have the Unemployment Benefits extended. The American worker wants to work but we need the funds to survive and find where the jobs are going to be. Since for 2 years the officals have been creating jobs, that we can not find. I go to Job Fairs turn in 20 -30 resumes and I am told we’ll take your resume but we are not hiring right now. Then why be there and take resumes. This has happened at 25 different fairs in 1 1/2 years, and I have talked with others that say the same thing.
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