The AFL-CIO Primary

LOS ANGELES: Looking for friends at the AFL-CIOs boisterous executive council winter meeting, Al Gore and Dick Gephardt tried out some of the rhetoric they are polishing for their own expected presidential campaigns three years from now. "This was really the first primary," says TIME's James Carney. "Gore is definitely running, and while Gephardt stopped short of admitting it, he is certainly Gore's leading competition." It was a tough crowd. Both Democrats tried to assuage union concerns that welfare reform will flood the job market with low-paid, non-union labor, hence further undermining organized labor. While Gephardt, a longtime friend of labor whose father was a Teamster, promised to introduce legislation to encourage former welfare recipients finding new jobs to join unions, Gore promised that President Clinton would veto any bill that forces employees to choose between overtime pay and compensatory time off for long hours. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney had opened the meeting with a call to action: having halted a twenty-year slide in membership, the union is now poised to sink fully one-third of its $60 million budget into a national organizing drive. Before leaving town, Gephardt took the opportunity to offer the union still another small plum, knocking NAFTA at a news conference, and telling reporters that it "was not working properly" and "needed to be improved." While Gephardt is decidedly an underdog in the early running for 2000, the AFL-CIO may view him as a way to keep Gore and Clinton off-balance as it continues to chip away at Administration trade policies it doesnt like. As for Gore, Carney reports, his task in Los Angeles was to tread lightly before a group that is Gephardts natural constituency, defending Administration policies while making clear that hell change them the first chance he gets.