Gillenwaters: 'The resistance has started.'
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT and KEA retiree
Nobody was happier at Saturday’s big "Stop Elon Musk" rally at the IBEW Local 369 hall in Louisville than Kirk Gillenwaters, president of the Kentucky Alliance for Retired Americans.
“The room was filled to capacity, and the unions are leading the way,” said Gillenwaters, a Louisville UAW Local 862 retiree.
The Louisville Democratic Party sponsored the gathering, announcing it on Thursday. “With the last-minute notice, there was worry that the crowd would be slim, especially with the rain forecast for the day,” wrote Bruce Maples in Forward Kentucky, his Louisville-based online publication. “As it turned out, the only thing the organizers needed to worry about was the size of the room – it was not large enough for the crowd.”
Maples also wrote that estimates put the crowd size at 500.
Speakers included Third District U.S. Rep Morgan McGarvey of Louisville. The Democrat is one of organized labor’s best friends in Washington. He scored 100 percent on the AFL-CIO’s Legislative Scorecard, which rates House and Senate members based on where they stand “on issues important to working families, including strengthening Social Security and Medicare, freedom to join a union, improving workplace safety and more.”
“I’ve known Morgan for 15 or 16 year, and I told him afterwards that this was the highlight speech of his political career,” Gillenwaters said. “I told him I wished John Yarmuth had been here to listen to this. John would have been so proud of what he said.” McGarvey succeeded Yarmuth, also a staunchly pro-union Louisville Democrat, who retired at the end of his term in January, 2023.
Gillenwaters said he “saw a lot of enthusiasm in the crowd—a lot of people had gray hair. We know the history. We know what a coup looks like.”
Gillenwaters, a veteran union activist, had been wondering when protests would start against President Donald Trump “as he tries to burn down the whole thing and dismantle the whole American system of government. Many people decided after the election to tune themselves out. But the resistance has started.”
He is especially pleased that unions are in the front ranks of Americans challenging the Trump administration’s all-out “attack on the safety net programs of this country that help the disabled, low income citizens, and the elderly, as well as Trump's attempt to break the unions in the public sector."
Public employee unions are suing the administration for threatening to fire career civil servants if they didn’t resign or retire.
Most unions endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris over Republican Trump. Exit polls showed that most union members voted for her. “We try to educate our members about how elections have consequences,” said Gillenwaters. “We were able to give our members a warning of what would be in store for them in the event of Trump being elected.”
He added, “We have seen the execution of most of the things that we had warned our members about -- a direct assault upon our union members. Trump is trying to divide and conquer the working class with hate.”
While he was gratified with the turnout for the Derby City rally, Gillenwaters said many progressives are still despondent over Trump’s victory and are “still on the sidelines and not even watching the news. We have to get those people back. We need to tell them, ‘The Trump administration is doing what they’re doing because you’re on the sidelines.'”