Political action once was at the bottom of Todd Towns' to-do list.
He'd never been involved in any election campaigns. In fact, he almost never even voted.
Towns had other things on his mind, like supporting his family and making a living at Las Vegas's McCarran International Airport as a Southwest Airlines ramp agent. The tough, exhausting job requires he load hundreds (if not thousands) of pieces of heavy luggage on and off aircraft every day, sometimes in desert temperatures as high as 125 degrees.
Yet over the past few years, Towns has become intensely interested and active in political action. He now sees how gets elections affect his family, his job, and his union, the Transport Workers (TWU).
He's heavily involved in the grassroots political action of TWU and the Nevada State AFL-CIO. During the 2006 election campaign, he put in long hours recruiting volunteers, getting in touch with campaign workers, organizing phone banks and precinct walks, putting together leaflets and planning get-out-the-vote efforts on election days.
He's gearing up to do the same—and more—this year.
The issues he's most concerned with this time around are those he sees around him every day. Working at the sixth-busiest airport in the nation, Towns is especially concerned about overseas outsourcing.
"I'm worried about our aircraft maintenance jobs being sent to countries overseas where the maintenance workers are paid a lot less than here," he says. "Plus, there's no good way for us to regulate whether they're adjusting the plane's landing gear right in Indonesia or some other country.
"It's like everyone's job here is in jeopardy somehow."
Another top issue is health care. He and other TWU members have won good insurance coverage at the bargaining table for most problems, but at home, "we have a special-needs son and we're always battling with the state for coverage, so I try to look at how any health issues will affect special-needs kids."
He's also worried about the subprime mortgage crisis, which has damaged Las Vegas more than most cities. Luckily, before the bottom fell out, Towns and his wife shifted to a fixed-rate mortgage from an adjustable-rate loan, but their monthly payments are a lot higher. He explains that "this is adding extra stress for us that we don't need right now."
In Towns's view, these aren't problems that get solved without a change in political leadership.
What really got Towns started in political action in the first place was his union.
After he and other Southwest workers voted to organize into the TWU in the early 1990s, Towns volunteered to be a shop steward in Local 555, a special TWU local of Southwest employees across the country who handle the passengers' baggage, supply their planes with food and make sure they're boarding their planes safely and comfortably.
For Local 555 members in Las Vegas, Towns did the type of jobs that every good shop steward knows very well—both the everyday routines like ensuring that overtime rules are respected and the much bigger tasks like saving a union brother from wrongful termination.
Then, in early 2000, his TWU district rep asked him to go to an AFL-CIO political training in Washington, D.C. Towns left the next day. He learned about the nuts and bolts of grassroots politics and why it's so important. He's pitched in with every election campaign since.
He's the first to say that his life has changed dramatically since becoming part of TWU.
"Where I'm at today, it's because of the Transport Workers Union," he observes. "The experiences I got with this union, the politics, the job opportunities that came along, everything—they wouldn't have happened without it."
