Harris-Walz ticket is firing up more than unions in Kentucky
By BERRY CRAIG
Alliance for Retired Americans
Recently, we posted an article about labor enthusiasm for the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket in Kentucky.
But apparently, it's not just those of us who pack union cards who are fired up about the Democratic duo.
"In the past few weeks the calls to our office from people asking how to volunteer with us or the Harris/Walz campaign has grown tremendously," wrote the Kentucky Democratic Party's Kenny Fogle in an email he sent today to county party leaders.
Fogle, the KDP deputy political director and a member of IBEW Local 369, said volunteers can go online and click on Volunteer with the Kentucky Democratic Party!
Okay, for the umpteenth time: Neither the national AFL-CIO nor state AFL-CIO federations like ours goes by party labels when we endorse candidates. We compare the records of candidates and endorse the ones who back organized labor. For a long time, most of those candidates have been Democrats.
Republicans Donald Trump and JD Vance vs. Democrats Harris and Walz was a slam dunk.
Trump was the most anti-labor president since the 1920s GOP trio of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Their Only Rich Lives Matter policies triggered to the Great Depression.
Vance, Ohio's junior senator, rated a flat zero on the most current AFL-CIO Legislative Scorecard. On a 0 to 100 percent scale, the scorecard rates senators and representatives on how they voted "on issues important to working families, including strengthening Social Security and Medicare, freedom to join a union, improving workplace safety and more." (By contrast, Democrat Sherrod Brown, the Buckeye State's senior senator, scored a perfect 100.)
Trump supports "right to work" and he promised to veto the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Harris opposes "right to work" and supports the PRO Act and the PSFNA.
Trump has never walked a picket line. Harris has. When Harris talks to workers, she goes to union halls and to union gatherings. Trump prefers posturing at non-union plants.
And Trump just said this to union-busting electric car manufacturer Elon Musk, reputedly the richest man in the world:
I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in, you say, You want to quit? They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, That’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.
The UAW immediately filed federal labor charges against Trump and Musk because, as a UAW news release pointed out, "under federal law, workers cannot be fired for going on strike, and threatening to do so is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act."
The release quoted UAW President Shawn Fain, who was a featured speaker at last year's Kentucky State AFL-CIO biennial convention in Lexington: When we say Donald Trump is a scab, this is what we mean. When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean. Donald Trump will always side against workers standing up for themselves, and he will always side with billionaires like Elon Musk, who is contributing $45 million a month to a Super PAC to get him elected. Both Trump and Musk want working class people to sit down and shut up, and they laugh about it openly. It’s disgusting, illegal, and totally predictable from these two clowns.