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Washington Prowler

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"It wasn't something we were aware of when we booked into Miami," says a DNC staffer. "Those arrangements were made by folks in Florida and by the city and the business groups that are making the pitch to us. Had we known we were in nonunion facilities, we might have looked elsewhere." Notice the use of the word "might."

The Miami junket isn't the first time Dems have gone against their union brothers in arms. When plans were still on to build a completely new DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C., the party looked into the hiring of nonunion construction help. "Unions support us because they understand we support their agenda more than Republicans do, but that doesn't mean that when it comes to business decisions we can't look elsewhere," says a former DNC staffer now working on Capitol Hill. "The unions understand that this can be a complicated relationship at times."

Sure. Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000 used a similar excuse when it was caught using some nonunion help to move into their headquarters in Tennessee.

And more recently there is Democratic candidate and former White House/Clinton senior adviser Rahm Emanuel, who is running for a House seat in Chicago, a big union town if ever there was one. Seems he renovated his home there a couple of years ago, and used nonunion labor for the job. And those folks did such good work he hired nonunion help to paint said abode a few weeks ago. While Emanuel hasn't denied the charges, he hasn't wasted a lot of time thinking about them, either. Which seems to sum up the union/Democratic Party relationship perfectly.

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Business, Environment, Unions