Labor unions are generally supportive of Democrats, as well they should be because they know from decades of experience that Republicans would, if they had total political control, legislate unions out of existence.
They've seen that happen in right-to-work states in the Confederacy, and they've seen what's happened recently in Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan.
So it's always disappointing when unions support Republicans. Often it's because they prefer to support incumbent politicians with some power, so they have "access" to argue on behalf of their members and hopefully limit the damage to their members that Republicans in power are wont to inflict.
From the Republican incumbents' point of view, they can strategically throw a few crumbs to the unions (never enough to piss off their tea party anti-government, anti-union base) in order to ensure that there will be little or no union support for a Democratic challenger.
That's evidently what happened in New York's SD-43 this year.
And that's really disappointing.
Why, below.
Kathy Marchione is the incumbent GOP senator in SD-43, a drawn-to-be-Republican district that includes parts of Warren and Washington counties, about half of Saratoga County, and most of Rensselaer and Columbia counties, minus the cities there.
Before becoming a senator, Marchione was a Republican elected official (town clerk and supervisor in Halfmoon, then Saratoga County clerk) for almost all of her adult life.
The bio on her official Senate webpage notes without irony that she was "selected as the 'Woman of Distinction' by Senator Roy McDonald in 2010."
In 2012, Marchione challenged and defeated McDonald in a primary. The only reason she ran and won was that McDonald had voted to support New York's historic marriage equality law, which angered and motivated the tea party base and gave her the opportunity to move up in political class.
Aside from her base bigotry, Marchione also ran on the standard GOP platform of decrying government spending and regulation.
Given her background and base of support in the right wing of the Republican Party, it's pretty obvious that, had she been a state legislator in Wisconsin, Indiana or Michigan, she would have voted for right-to-work laws and to decimate public employee unions.
So it was personally disappointing when the union I belong to, the Civil Service Employees Association, decided to endorse a tea party Republican like Marchione.
At first, I thought it was just a Machiavellian move -- Marchione is overwhelmingly favored to win against Democrat Brian Howard, a career educator and union member who has few resources for the kind of mail and media campaign that's necessary to topple an incumbent senator.
But I learned recently that there was really a crumb that made CSEA support Marchione.
At a CSEA meeting, I asked CSEA Capital Region President Kathy Garrison why our union was supporting such a conservative Republican.
She responded that Marchione had "moved heaven and earth" to help CSEA in its campaign for more staff and safer working conditions at the Brookwood Secure Center in Claverack, Columbia County.
I wondered about that, and whether Marchione's involvement was little more than Constituent Services 101 -- meeting with the locals, promising to "fight" for changes, sending a strongly worded letter to the agency in charge of Brookwood, maybe holding a Senate committee hearing on violence in juvenile facilities, and hoping that that garners votes/support.
There's no evidence on the Google that any of that happened -- CSEA has been protesting about the violence perpetrated on its members by the juvenile criminals at Brookwood for more than a year, but any movement of heaven and earth by Marchione on behalf of CSEA employees at Brookwood has escaped the Internet's notice (which includes the CSEA newspaper).
Perhaps Marchione did do something about Brookwood, and no newspaper, even CSEA's, covered it. A strongly worded letter and related press release would be news, at least for the Hudson paper, IMHO.
Beyond that one issue, Marchione is also, like most Republicans reading from the Reagan/Bush script, adamantly against "out-of-control" state spending and regulation.
Marchione rarely stands out as a legislator, except for this -- she was given the Oil Slick Award by the the state's top environmental group for her bill that "requires the arbitrary repeal at least 1,000 regulations," most of which protect workers, consumers, public health and the environment from corporate excesses.
What Marchione's crusade against government spending and regulation also means, if she were to get her way, is a lot fewer jobs for people in a union that mistakenly endorsed her.
For more about how terrible Marchione is, check out Upstate Blue's series of posts about this race. Unlike me, he has Photoshop skillz:
About the Oil Slick award -- http://www.dailykos.com/...
More about that -- http://www.dailykos.com/...
About Marchione chickening out of a debate with a pure BS excuse -- http://www.dailykos.com/...
About Marchione's major donor's indictment -- http://www.dailykos.com/...
More about that -- http://www.dailykos.com/...
Even more about that -- http://www.dailykos.com/...
About Brian Howard -- http://www.dailykos.com/...