Dogs. Insults. Yes, It's a Battleground. By Steven Greenhouse New York Times October 30, 2004
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Oct. 27 - For Adela Simone, a long way from her apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, it was quickly becoming a frustrating afternoon - at four homes in a row, no one answered the door, and at the next house, an elderly woman began screaming at her. "Don't annoy me, I'm busy," the woman shouted at Ms. Simone, one of 200 health care workers from New York who have been in Florida for weeks, going door to door to urge Democrats and Kerry-leaning independents to vote. "I already had three people annoy me last week." But Ms. Simone soldiered on, and in a neighborhood of palm trees and modest, cookie-cutter homes built for retirees, she felt better after she knocked on Helen Scolnick's door. Mrs. Scolnick, who moved here from Flatbush, Brooklyn, three decades ago, talked enthusiastically, delighted to learn that Ms. Simone had once run a hair salon in East Flatbush, and pleasing her by promising to vote for Mr. Kerry. "I hope our man comes in," Mrs. Scolnick said. "Enough is enough. The guy in there now, he's a yutz," a Yiddish word meaning a dope. Ms. Simone is a foot solder in the biggest effort that any union local in the nation has undertaken to elect John Kerry. Her union, 1199/S.E.I.U., the giant New York health care union, is spending $10 million to send more than 800 nurses, hospital housekeepers, lab technicians and other union members to battleground states to work full-time to elect Mr. Kerry. While a horde of lawyers, college students and others will be flooding into swing states over the weekend for a last-minute push for their candidates, 1199 plunged into this cross-border politicking earlier and more forcefully than virtually anyone else. In April, it dispatched 210 New Yorkers to work full time in the campaign, increasing that number to 400 in July, to 650 in September and now to more than 800. This month, the union has 211 members working in Florida, 197 in Pennsylvania, 162 in Ohio and others in 10 other battleground states. All have been granted leave from their regular jobs. "Kerry's ahead by something like 27 points in New York," said Dennis Rivera, 1199's president, who was in Florida this week to rally his troops. "So it's very clear that the action is not in New York, and that in order to win, we have to have people helping out in the battleground states." At 1199, a 250,000-member union local that is part of the Service Employees International Union, these volunteers have been officially given the title "heroes," and with good reason. Some have been attacked by dogs while canvassing, and in Florida, a few collapsed from dehydration from all the door-knocking in July and August. A stray bullet hit one 1199 member in the shoulder while he was registering voters in Philadelphia. "We believe that anybody who is willing to leave their friends and families to travel to a battleground state to do this very intense and difficult work is being a hero," said Jennifer Cunningham, 1199's political director. The nation's labor movement boasts that more than 6,000 union members - steel workers, auto workers, municipal employees - are working full time this month to help Mr. Kerry by, among other things, registering black and Hispanic voters, staffing phone banks and recruiting volunteers for Election Day. At 1199, there is an unmistakable pride that it has contributed more than 10 percent of organized labor's political volunteers. "They're doing an incredible job," said Karen Ackerman, the political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., a federation of 60 unions and 13 million workers. "This year, because this is such an important election, the scale is completely different for the whole labor movement. It's a sea change. Our program is at least three to four times as large as in 2000." For 1199, the political work goes well beyond its full-time campaign workers. More than 5,000 of the union's members have agreed to take charter buses to Philadelphia on Tuesday to get out the vote. The union has even rented Philadelphia's main sports arena, the Wachovia Center, to serve as operations center for its Election Day blitz in Pennsylvania. Ms. Simone, a home health aide who immigrated from Bulgaria, said she leapt at the chance when 1199's leaders sought to enlist members to do full-time campaign work for a month or more. She spends six hours a day canvassing, often in 85-degree heat, often knocking on 100 doors. Some people slam the door in her face, but most talk to her, and she urges them to vote and gives them fliers describing the differences between President Bush's and Mr. Kerry's health policies. She also offers to arrange rides to the polls, either on Election Day or for the state's early voting, for elderly Floridians who have given up driving. "We cannot go four more years with Bush," Ms. Simone said. "If Bush wins, it will impact generations to come. I disagree with him about everything, starting with Iraq." Depending on their regular salaries, 1199 is paying these campaign workers $600 to $900 a week. Officials say it costs the union $2,000 per worker per week - it gives a $35 per diem for food, it rents eight-seat vans to ferry workers around, and it pays for their lodging. The $10 million to cover the effort comes from 1199's dues money and from a political action committee that half its members contribute to each week. Almost all of 1199's campaigners are working for America Coming Together, a two-year-old group that has worked in battleground states to register 400,000 black, Hispanic and low-income voters deemed likely to vote Democratic. In addition, the group's canvassers, focusing on neighborhoods where turnout is traditionally low, are pushing to make sure that Democrats and Kerry-leaning independents vote. Republicans are not delighted about the influx of union members to Florida. They assert that union leaders have manipulated their workers into backing Mr. Kerry and that groups like America Coming Together have illegally coordinated their efforts with the Democratic Party. "Although we welcome participation in the political process, it's really sad to see how union leaders manipulate not only the law, but their membership," said Joseph Agostini, spokesman for the Florida Republican Party. Union officials deny such allegations. The leaders of 1199 have sought to harness its diversity to help Mr. Kerry. Union members from the Caribbean are visiting neighborhoods filled with Jamaican and Haitian immigrants while Hispanic union members are visiting households in the Little Havana district of Miami in a nonpartisan voter registration project, Mi Familia Vota. Some 1199 workers boast of registering 3,000 voters themselves. In one poor neighborhood, Victoria Heath, an immigrant from Jamaica and a nurse at the Village Nursing Home in Manhattan, knocked on a door, but the man who responded could hardly understand English. Her partner, Yolande LeBlanc, a Haitian immigrant and a home-health aide in Manhattan, came to the rescue, speaking in Creole. "Don't worry, I'll vote," said the man, Bastien Joseph, a registered Democrat. In Little Havana, Adelaida Montalvo, a patient services associate at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, was visiting residents registered by 1199's members, urging them to vote. Standing under a mangrove tree outside her house, Jessica Barrientos, a 22-year-old from Puerto Rico, assured Ms. Montalvo that she would vote, but then said something that would disappoint many 1199 members. "I'm going to vote for Bush," she said. When Ms. Montalvo asked why, Ms. Barrientos said, "Because that's what my father said I should do." 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