Hampton’s speech: All about her 100 ‘I’s’ and ‘me’s’ in eight minutes
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
State Rep. Jeff Taylor, D-Hopkinsville, went to his first Labor-Management Conference expecting Republican Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton, the keynote speaker, to urge “labor, management and state government to come together for the good of Kentucky.”
Instead, she insulted unions, according to the first-term lawmaker.
“She said that while she went to work offering her services and talents to the tea party ‘all you guys were on vacation.’ I don’t know if was her intention to be offensive, but a lot of union members were offended.”
Taylor said they—and he-- took her comment to mean “union members were just lazy and not doing their jobs.”
Hampton and GOP Gov. Matt Bevin are tea party conservatives whose disdain for unions is hardly a secret. Both strongly support a “right to work” law.
Taylor said when some union members quietly held up anti-RTW signs “she made the comment, ‘I see your little signs over there’ in a very demeaning and belittling tone.”
Taylor added that union members he spoke with were also “waiting for a unity speech.”
An official state government news release quoted Hampton as saying, “As a former plant manager, I understand the critical importance and productivity associated with positive labor-management relationships. Every employee is vital to an organization accomplishing its mission.”
The conference, sponsored by the state Labor and Economic Development cabinets, is held annually at Kentucky Dam Village State Park. Begun in 1977, the conference is designed to bring representatives of organized labor and management together in a relaxed, informal setting “to promote labor-management cooperation as an enhancement to economic development,” according to the Labor Cabinet website.
Taylor was elected last March in a special election and is up for reelection Nov. 8. The Kentucky State AFL-CIO endorsed him for the special and fall elections.
A Tennessee Valley Authority retiree and former union member, Taylor sat with some members of the United Auto Workers. “She talked about her dad who worked for Chrysler in Detroit, where she is from. We knew he must have been a UAW member.”
Taylor said a number of UAW members remarked that Hampton “is completely out of touch with working people and that she evidently forgot that her dad belonged to the United Auto Workers.
“Several African American union members said they had never seen an African American so out of touch with other African Americans as she is.”
Explained Taylor, who is African American: “They said they were very proud Kentucky has its first African American lieutenant governor, but were disappointed in her. A lot of white union members said they felt the same.”
Brandon Duncan, president of USW Local 727 in Calvert City, also panned Hampton’s speech.
Duncan, who is white, said Hampton spent her whole address promoting herself. “About 10 minutes into the speech, I said to myself, ‘How many times is she going to say ‘I’ or ‘me?’”
Duncan said he started writing down Hampton’s “I’s” and “me’s.” He said he hit 100 in eight minutes “and it never got any better.”
He said some people walked out. “I told our guys who weren’t there that we needed to get a tape of her speech and use it as a training video. Anybody who comes into our local should have to watch it and see what a tea partier sounds like.”
Besides heading a factory, Hampton, who earned a degree in engineering, was an Air Force captain and Bowling Green tea party activist.
Taylor also said that Hampton called herself a student of black history. “She said she had studied Dr. Martin Luther King and the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech where he said he looked ‘to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’"
Taylor said Hampton “evidently forgot that Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis where he went to be with striking union sanitation workers. In her study of history, she must have missed reading about the relationship of Dr. King with organized labor.”
In a 1961 speech to the AFL-CIO constitutional convention, King denounced RTW: “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.
“Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”
Taylor said when Hampton was speaking, he recalled another King quote from the same speech: "Our needs are identical with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community.
“That is why Negroes support labor's demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why 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."
Taylor, who ended his TVA tenure as an economic development executive, said membership in IBEW Local 558 launched his career.
“I went to work for TVA in Sheffield, Ala., as an apprentice in Local 558. I was able to get training and go to college and eventually I got a management position.
“The union was my toehold in TVA.”