By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
Hear the whispers behind your back? The snickers?
Turn around. See them elbow nudging each other?
They're the labor-haters. They can hardly believe they can still gull a slew of working class voters into casting ballots for the bare-knucks union-busting candidates they bankroll.
For more than 40 years the labor-haters have been running the social issues con on folks who live a long way from Easy Street. Traditionally, the grift has been on abortion and guns. These days, they've expanded it to include Critical Race Theory.
They claim CRT is taught in K-12 schools. It's not. Nor is CRT what they say it is. Explains Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, my union: "It's a method of examination taught in law school and college that helps analyze whether systemic racism exists — and, in particular, whether it has an effect on law and public policy. But culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned 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."
Abortion is not a union issue. The gun issue is a phony issue. America is, by far, the most gun-toting of the industrial democracies.
Anyway, the union-haters trot out the social issues to hide their real agenda: enriching the rich and wiping out unions.
You’d think it would be mission impossible to get a lot of working people to vote against their own livelihoods. But with the social issues, it’s been mission accomplished for the GOP since Reagan--the most anti-union president since Hoover--started the grift. It continued through Trump, the most anti-union president since Reagan, and it's still going.
"The great dream of conservatives ever since the thirties has been a working class movement that for once takes their side of the issues, that votes Republican and reverses the achievements of working-class movements of the past,” Thomas Frank wrote in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.
Published in 2004, the book is as timely as ever.
Added the author:
“Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.”
You could substitute "Kentucky" for “Kansas.”
Remember Matt Bevin? In 2015, he ran for governor on the Republican ticket, claiming he was pro-life and pro-gun, and he won.
A lot of union members saw Bevin and the well-heeled union-busting Republicans for the frauds they are. "They're not pro-life," said Kentucky State AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Jeff Wiggins. "They're pro-birth. They don't care what happens to kids after they're born."
So how did Bevin reward working class voters who cast ballots for him on abortion and guns? In 2017, after the Republicans gained majorities in the state House and Senate, he egged on GOP lawmakers to pass a "right to work" law and to repeal the prevailing wage.
Republicans have been going after workers comp, unemployment insurance and our state Occupational Safety and Health programs since.
Unions played a big role in electing Democrat Andy Beshear over Bevin in 2019. (Beshear hasn't confiscated anybody's gun.) But the Republicans can override him with a simple majority of both houses. So he needs help in the legislature. More on that in a minute.
The Republicans enjoy what one Democratic lawmaker called a "super-super-majority" in the legislature. It will take multiple election cycles to restore the kind of pro-union majorities that for years stayed Kentucky from the RTW lineup and kept PW on the statute books.
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step," said Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher and writer.
We can start with three steps in tomorrow's special elections by helping send to Frankfort our Kentucky State AFL-CIO endorsed candidates: Helen Bukulmez (Senate District 22), Eddie Rogers (House District 51), and Mae Suramek (House District 89).
If you pack a union card and live in these districts, now's your chance to show the union-busters that you're clued into their scam and that you're voting your economic interests--not theirs.