In economically hard-hit eastern Pennsylvania, Ed O'Brien, a steelworker and union official, is running for Congress against incumbent Republican Pat Toomey, a well-funded former investment banker who champions Social Security privatization and regressive tax cuts. "I ran because working families, the middle class, had absolutely no voice in Washington from this district," O'Brien said. After a close race last election, O'Brien's chances have been buoyed by the sagging economy. But his biggest advantage is the sophisticated political organizing of the labor movement.

From its low point in 1994 with the Gingrich-engineered Republican triumph, organized labor has revived its political operations by mobilizing members and their families through direct educational work about candidates and public policy, especially economic issues linked to work. It has refined its organizational capacity to register members, inform them (most effectively at the workplace) and get them to vote for union-backed candidates. Now AFSCME (public workers) president Gerald McEntee can plausibly argue that labor has "the best internal political infrastructure of any organization in the country," including the political parties. Increasingly, unions have encouraged their members, like O'Brien, to run for office or have supported labor-friendly candidates in primaries, and many Democrats campaign on a "working-family-lite" version of labor's agenda.

Yet all this has yielded at best a precarious, right-leaning stalemate in Washington and a mixed bag at state level. Even as labor has helped resurrect Democratic fortunes, many unionists are unhappy with the party's performance. "Our members have been betrayed by Democrats who were not willing to support organizing campaigns, not willing to fight for labor law reform and not willing to fight for manufacturing jobs," complained Chris Chafe, political director of UNITE, the textile and apparel union. "It's not like we're discounting allies in the Democratic Party who support our issues. The shift is that we won't be taken for granted. It's the feeling of many in labor that we've maintained the structure of the Democratic Party while the party has ignored our issues."

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