Labor Union PACs Dominate Local Elections

At the federal level, labor unions exert substantial influence on elections, handling over $13 million in contributions in the 2021-2022 campaign season alone according to data from OpenSecrets.

While substantial, they regularly rank below other industries like finance and leadership PACs and sometimes health care industry advocates in Congressional elections.

But at the level of state and city elections, labor union PACs are often the largest single recipients of political funds.

In Washington, D.C. labor union PACs regularly represent 23 percent of total PAC contributions led by groups like Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and UNITE HERE Local 25 and are the second and sixth largest respectively.

In Philadelphia, they represent 15 percent of all committee contributions, including campaign committees, led by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), spending $8 million a year on average over the last decade.

Some districts don’t designate which election the political contributions are for, so Philadelphia contribution data could ostensibly include Philadelphia election data and Pennsylvania-wide data.

San Francisco may be unique as political funding there is dominated by ballot initiatives. For example, a recent political committee against candy flavored cigarettes raised over $20 million for one ballot initiative. The closest labor-related PACs—the San Francisco Labor Council and the Transport Workers Union—only raised around a million and a half between the both of them.

The influence of labor unions drops off dramatically in Right-To-Work states—those that don’t require union membership for employment in unionized fields. For example, in the Right-To-Work state of Wisconsin, labor union PACs are almost non-existent.

Georgia is a Right-To-Work state, although it still brings in a substantial amount of labor money, over $6 million since 2006, but a sizable portion of that comes from outside of the state, particularly Washington, D.C.

Compare that to Pennsylvania elections where the vast majority of labor union funds comes from in-state.