Labor canvass to target McCain, support … who?
The Democratic Party’s push to re-gain the White House is slowly but surely drifting from the nomination process to the November election.
But are the unions already there?
The Missouri AFL-CIO, along with the state’s bricklayers’ union, announced today that dozens of labor supporters will take part in a door-to-door canvass Saturday to “educate union voters” about John McCain’s stance on issues such as health care, trade and the economy.
In particular, a spokeswoman said, the canvass will highlight McCain’s proposal to do away with job-provided health insurance. Instead, McCain is proposing to give families a $5,000 a year tax credit to buy their own.
Participants in the statewide effort will gather in St. Joseph, Kansas City and Bridgeton, and be part of a national “McCain Revealed” push in battleground states.
In Missouri, this weekend’s canvass is targeting the very type of voters - blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” popular in Rust Belt states like Ohio and Pennsylvania - that will be a key swing demographic for the Barack Obama campaign.
While the union push this week is decidedly anti-McCain, will it be pro-Obama? Or fueled by the final hopes of a Hillary Clinton nomination?
Could be something to ask if they knock on your door this weekend.
So you guys lost the whole residential wiring business because scab contractors hired illegal Mexicans who got arrested and deported, huh?
I don’t blame union members for anything.
I blame the union bosses who lose their jobs for them.
You need to educate yourself about the assault on unions.
I did. Mark Ayers, the president of the AFL-CIO’s Building & Construction Trades Department (BCTD), is finally sending a wake-up call to his union bretheren:
“There is no place in our unions for nonperformers,” Ayers told business managers of the Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons during a recent speech recently.
Calling non-performing union members a cancer that has “dragged us down for many years and damaged our reputation as highly trained and productive craft professionals,” during a Feb. 27 OPC-MIA meeting, Ayers said, “they are the members that scream the loudest about union rights on the job, in your hiring halls and in your union meetings, while at the same time they chip away at our proud foundation.”
In short, he said, “they are simply bad for business, and therefore, they must go!”
He reminded the business managers that in the current business environment anyone can find out anything about an organization with a few clicks of a mouse.
“We must understand that we are constantly being judged by what we do and how we conduct ourselves every single day we are on the job,” he said. “Over the last thirty years or so, we didn’t lose the lion’s share of the market because the competition was so good,” he said. ‘We lost it because our attitudes, our productivity, and our work ethic got worse and we took our jobs and our work for granted.”