By Tom Hamburger, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer 2:30 PM PST, February 14, 2008Columbus, Ohio -- The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, one of the nation's largest labor organizations and a force in battleground state politics, voted today to support Sen. Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee for president.
The move is a blow to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose campaign had also sought the union's backing. The UFCW is a prize because it is one of the largest in the country and is particularly influential in states with upcoming primaries: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
In Ohio, the union has 70,000 members who work in supermarkets and food processing.
That makes the union more influential than even the United Steelworkers, which now represents 56,000 workers in the state. Both campaigns have been aggressively courting the steelworkers union nationally, because of its influence in all three states. But as recently as this past weekend, the steelworkers union leadership decided to remain neutral.
In Texas, the UFCW has 26,000 workers, many of them Latinos working in the meatpacking industry.
The decision was made at 5 p.m. vote of the UFCW board, meeting by conference call. The union considers both Clinton and Obama as friends, said Jill Cashen, a union spokeswoman. But leaders were impressed at the appeal of Obama, particularly to younger members.
More than 40 percent of the UFCW membership is under 30, Cashen said, and the union became aware of Obama's appeal to that age group. "And our young people have become engaged in politics as never before," she said. "It's a sea change."
tom.hamburger@latimes.com
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