By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
I know summertime is vacation time, but election day is less than four months away.
"If our brothers and sisters aren't fired up about this election, I don't know what it would take to fire them up," a veteran western Kentucky union leader told me.
I agreed.
Anyway, last month, we posted a list of candidates your elected state COPE committee endorsed for the fall campaign. Click here to take another gander at it.
Endorsements for the state legislature and the U.S. House and Senate are based on input from union locals through their central labor councils, which vote to recommend candidates.
Your COPE committee doesn't look at party labels when it meets to endorse. Nor do committee members fall for the old social issues con job some politicians used to divide us and to fool us into voting against our own livelihoods.
State AFL-CIO endorsements are based on how incumbents vote on labor issues and how challengers answer our questionnaires.
Our endorsed incumbents opposed:
"right to work"
prevailing wage repeal
paycheck deception
gutting public pensions, workers' compensation and unemployment benefits
a "Robin Hood in Reverse" tax bill that lavished the big tax breaks on the wealthy and slapped new sales taxes on the rest of us
Our endorsed challengers pledged their opposition to all that anti-worker, anti-union and anti-family legislation that passed. They promised to do all they could to reverse the union-busting bills.
So study the list of our candidates. Find the ones in your neck of the woods. Don't just vote for them; volunteer to help them.
The old saying, "Vote like your job and your union depend on it" may sound trite. But it's true.