Working Families Party
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Image:Working Families Party.PNG The Working Families Party (WFP) is a minor political party in the United States founded in New York in 1998. The party also has a wing in Connecticut.
New York's Working Families Party was first organized in 1998 by a coalition of labor unions, ACORN and other community organizations, members of the now-inactive national New Party, and a variety of public interest groups. The party blends a culture of political organizing with unionism, 1960s idealism, and realistic tactical pragmatism. The party's main issue concerns are jobs, health care, education and energy/environment, and it has won notable policy gains at the city, county and state level by piggybacking on Democratic candidates.
In the 2002 election for governor of New York, the party cross-endorsed the Democratic Party candidate, Carl McCall. Because he received more than 50,000 votes on the WFP line, the party gained an automatic ballot line for the succeeding four years. In the same election, the Liberal Party, running Andrew Cuomo (who had withdrawn from the Democratic primary), and the Green Party, running its own candidate, failed to reach that threshold and lost the ballot lines they had previously won. This left the WFP as the only left-progressive minor party with a ballot line. One slogan of the Working Families Party is "The minor party with major possibilities."
As of 2006, the executive director of the WFP is Dan Cantor. The party's Co-Chairs are Jim Duncan, a retired UAW leader from Cheektowaga (outside Buffalo), Bertha Lewis, an ACORN leader in NYC, and Bob Master of the Communications Workers of America. The WFP also has a powerful alliance with Dennis Rivera and Local 1199/SEIU (Service Employees International Union). The intensely activist union is known to contribute more than $100,000 a year of the party's $1.4 million annual budget.
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Unique Structure of Party
The Working Families Party's leaders, including Executive Director Dan Cantor, Party Chairs Bob Master and Bertha Lewis, and Secretary Jon Kest, have spent the past few years engaged in court battles to prevent party members from forming constituted county committees. They deny registrants the opportunity to select candidates and determine the party's direction by allowing their shadow organization, the Working Families Organization (which requires paid membership but does not require membership in the Working Families Party), to screen candidates. It is the state committee of the Organization, not the Party, that determines who will appear on the ballot and makes policy decisions for the party. Individuals have no vote within the Working Families Organization, instead groups (like ACORN and 1199) are assigned a number of votes based on the number of paid memberships they purchase. The duly elected members of the state committee have been rendered powerless and irrelevant by this process.
Eight years after achieving ballot status, the Working Families Party has county committee members in only one county, Suffolk, and it is actively attempting to quash that committee. Cantor and the WFO failed in their attempts to dismantle the Working Families Party Suffolk County Committee; although a judge ordered the 2004 county convention to be redone, the "do-over" convention held in 2005 produced exactly the same result as the 2004 convention confirming Chuck Pohanka as County Chair, Donna Lent as Secretary, and Dotty Weisgruber as Treasurer.
to view documents from that court case, go to: http://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/fcas/fcas_docs/2005jun/51002178720041sciv.pdf http://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/fcas/fcas_docs/2005jul/5100217872004100sciv.pdf http://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/fcas/fcas_docs/2005jul/51002178720042sciv.pdf
In an August 2005 decision, Judge Thomas Whelan took the Executive Committee of the New York State Working Families Party to task for subverting election law through its attempts to prevent formation of county committees and deny county committee members control of nominations through Wilson-Pakula.
read that decision at: http://decisions.courts.state.ny.us/fcas/fcas_docs/2005aug/51001598520051sciv.pdf
Despite Whelan's decision, the New York State Working Families Party continues in its efforts to prevent formation of county committees and, specifically, to quash the Suffolk County Committee of the Working Families Party. Most recently, it sent letters to elected officials telling them to contribute only to the state party.
Electoral strategy
Like other minor parties in the state, the WFP benefits from New York's liberal electoral fusion laws that allow cross-endorsement of a single candidate by multiple parties. Usually, the WFP endorses the Democratic Party candidate, but it has occasionally endorsed Republican Party candidates in Suffolk (thanks to the county committee), Westchester, Nassau, and Erie counties, often as a strategy for spurring bi-partisan action on its policy priorities. The party's sometime-position at the balance of electoral power and the threat of Republican endorsement has allowed it to influence the politics of local Democratic candidates and the state Democratic party. The support of the WFP can even be important in Democratic primaries: in Albany, the WFP may have illegally influenced the Democratic primary for District Attorney to spur a victory for David Soares using improper donations from George Soros' Drug Policy Alliance Network. http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A2074_0_2_0_C/
In unusual cases, the WFP has put forward its own candidates. In 2000, over the objections of the WFO who planned to endorse incumbent Republican-turned-Democrat Debra Mazzarelli, Suffolk WFP member Pat Eddington and the Suffolk WFP petitioned for WFP line in the 3rd Assembly District. Mazzarelli dropped out of the race and, with Democratic cross-endorsement, Eddingtion became the first WFP registrant elected to statewide office. In 2005, her husband, Jack Eddington, also a member of the Suffolk WFP, was elected to the Suffolk County Legislature with Democratic cross-endorsement. In the chaotic situation following the assassination of New York City councilman James E. Davis by political rival Othniel Askew, the slain coucilman's brother Geoffrey Davis was chosen to succeed him in the Democratic primary. As it became clear that Geoffrey Davis lacked his late brother's political experience, fellow Democrat Letitia James decided to challenge him in the general election on the WFP ticket and won Brooklyn's 35th City Council district as the first third-party candidate elected there in 30 years. In 2003, the WFP had candidates in over 500 races throughout New York State, the majority of them cross-endorsed.
As of November 1, 2005, the Working Families Party had 30,391 enrolled members [1], who are eligible to vote in party primaries, 0.26% of registered voters statewide. Because the WFOs control the WFP, these 30,391 enrollees have no voice in selecting the party's candidates.
Platform
The WFP was launched with the agenda of well-paying jobs, affordable housing, accessible health care, better public schools and more investment in public services.
On December 6, 2004, the WFP saw the enactment of one of its highest legislative priorities, an increase in the New York State minimum wage, which it had supported since its inception. On that day, both the State Assembly and the State Senate joined to override Governor George E. Pataki’s veto of an original bill passed in July, 2004. On January 1, 2005, the state's minimum wage raised to $6.00 an hour from $5.15, before two additional annual steps that will reach $7.15 an hour. Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation points out that "For a full-time worker, that's an increase from $10,700 per year to $14,900." According to the Drum Major Institute, it is estimated that 500,000 New Yorkers directly benefited from the wage increase.
Another major platform of the WFP is to defeat the "Rockefeller drug laws" in New York State, remnant from when Nelson Rockefeller was Governor. On election day, November 2, 2004, the WFP contributed largely to the victory of David Soares to Albany County District Attorney. Soares' platform was based on reforming the draconian drug policy, while generally taking a less punitive approach to criminal justice. On December 8, 2004, the most significant reform package of the Rockefeller Drug Laws in 30 years was passed by the State legislature and later was signed by Governor Pataki. While failing to advocate for more judicial discretion, drug treatment over incarceration, and retroactive sentencing reform (meaning the ability to apply these changes to those who have already been sentenced), the reforms are applauded by most as a long overdue, good first step. The reforms do effectively reduce minimum sentences for drug charges, and allow for those convicted of such charges to enter medical treatment centers more easily. The WFP looks forward to continuing to make progress on this issue in the future.
Sources
- Newfield, J., "Working Families Party Takes Place at the Table", The New York Sun, 11 Nov, 2003.