Harold Meyerson argues that this Democratic convention offers the latest demonstrations that Kerry's team takes labor more seriously than Clinton's ever did: Longtime union officials and staffers were exuding an almost gleeful incredulity this weekend on the eve of the convention...whatever the laborites’ sentiments about November, they are stunned and pleased to find that the Kerry campaign is actually encouraging their input and involvement in the convention and the campaign. “I’ve been working with the Democratic Party for 30 years,” says one of labor’s most senior operatives, “and for the first time in my memory, we’re being treated like partners.” For decades, despite the ostensibly pro-labor tilt of the Democratic Party, unions have had to fight just to get pro-worker language onto the platform on such crucial issues as trade. Not this year. Thea Lee, the AFL-CIO’s chief policy and politics staffer on all things trade related, noted that Kerry’s platform watchdogs were happy to see that the platform includes the need for establishing workers’ rights and labor and environmental standards in trade accords...Labor has also received enthusiastic backing on the platform and from the Kerry-Edwards ticket for its foremost institutional imperative, the Employee Free Choice Act ...near-consensual acceptance within the Democratic Party of the imperative of changing labor law should not have been any great achievement. From any number of perspectives -- ensuring workers their fundamental rights, creating a force to boost wage income (our current raiseless recovery is in good part a consequence of our union-free private sector), boosting Democrats’ electoral prospects (union members invariably vote about 10 percent more Democratic than the population as a whole) -- persuading the Democrats to support labor-law reform should have been a no-brainer. But it was never a priority of the Clinton administration, and it required a sustained program of elected-official consciousness-raising -- bringing workers illegally fired while on organizing drives, for instance, to the congressional Democrats’ retreats -- on the part of John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO to make this a key issue for the party, Kerry, and John Edwards. The result? Edwards appeared at Sunday’s caucus via teleconference, telling attendees, “We need a president who believes in the right to organize.”