Labor’s Risky Plunge into Politics

In July 1983 Marty Manley, one of a number of able young staffers laid off by the decimated International Association of Machinists, traveled to Washington to meet with Paul Jensen, labor liaison of the Mondale campaign. Manley had come to propose that the campaign adopt a variant of the IAM’s On-the-Job Canvass, a program in which Machinist shop stewards polled their members in the workplaces and used their responses to develop a range of programs in the shops. In the San Jose local in...