To win those rights, we are going to need to build alliances with labor and its constituencies: low income workers, immigrants and Latinos.
The battle lines in the debate are familiar, pitting some of the Democrats' leading constituencies, including labor and the Working Families Party, against powerful small-business interests, including the Business Council of New York State, a lobbying group.
Mr. Perkins said that whoever was elected mayor would play a big role in choosing the speaker, and that borough politics and large constituencies like labor would play roles as well.
Larry Cohen, the former president of the Communications Workers of America, sharply questioned whether some Democrats are losing their way ideologically as they attempt to foster a close relationship with an industry that has in ways undermined core Democratic constituencies like labor.
Aside from Bernie Sanders and the progressive wing of the Party, the Democrats have more often thrown in with the interests of moneyed elites than with their traditional constituencies, especially labor.
If these types of challenges become more standard in the future, we'll look back on the primary campaign against Lincoln as a time when labor and other progressive constituencies started demanding candidates who are champions, not fair-weather friends.
Hence, political economy concerns about the impact of such regulations on constituencies for child labor reform are probably not of first order importance (Deopke and Zilibotti 2005).
Small businesses, which employ about 40percentt of the private labor force, are a big constituency for both parties.
This embrace of economic nationalism is partly just a sop to important political constituencies, like big oil and organized labor.
