AP scribes trot out old anti-union slam

By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

Memo to David Eggert and Sara Burnett of the Associated Press: UAW President Gary Jones isn’t a “Democratic union boss.” Neither are union officials, period.

In their story about the UAW strike at GM, the scribes wrote that when Donald Trump ran for president, he “pulled key voters away from their Democratic union bosses.”

It's hardly a scoop that more than a few union members voted for Trump. (Most of us didn't.) 

But "union boss," is a blatant union-bashing term. While most union members vote Democratic, the UAW isn't an extension of the Democratic Party--nor is any other union.

Anyway, I used to be a freelance feature writer for the AP in Kentucky. The news reporters I knew prided themselves on fairness and accuracy. As far as I know, the current Bluegrass State AP newshounds do, too.

To be sure, Eggert and Burnett aren’t the only reporters guilty of trotting out "union boss." Surf the net, and you’ll find "union boss" in more than a few mainstream media stories or headlines.

Maybe the reporters didn't mean "union boss" as a slam. But "union boss" implies a shady character who wields arbitrary and unchecked power over the "bossed."

By calling an elected union leader "union boss" (all union leaders are elected, from shop stewards to international presidents), union-haters want Jane and John Q Citizen to envision some mythical, paunchy, bald-headed, cigar-puffing guy in a tailor-made suit with his Salvatore Ferragamo-shod feet propped on a big desk piled with cash he bilked from the poor, unsuspecting membership.

The term "union boss" is a standby smear at Fox News, the National Right to Work Committee and the rest of the anti-union crowd. Calling union officials "union bosses" is part of a twofold strategy: to turn the public against organized labor and to divide rank-and-file union members from their officials.

If Eggert and Burnett read some newspaper history, they'd discover that Westbrook Pegler helped popularize "union boss." Largely forgotten today, he was a reactionary, red-baiting, racist, homophobic, xenophobic and anti-Semitic syndicated newspaper columnist of the mid-20th century.

Pegler favored "the praiseworthy pastime of batting the brains out of pickets" during strikes. He despised Martin Luther King, who famously observed that "the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth."

The AP prides itself on playing news stories straight, "Journalists at The Associated Press utilize a set of standards and practices that safeguards AP stories from bias and inaccuracies," says the AP's website.

"Democratic union bosses" is biased and inaccurate.