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The Western Kentucky Worker | |
Official newsletter of the Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO
Prepared by Berry Craig, KEA-NEA and AFT Local 6038
Volume 6, Number 1, January, 2005
Machinist, labor activist ‘Bad Eye' Reed will be missed
“Bad Eye” Reed was a good union man, says Glenn Dowdy, Council president for many years.
“He was active in his union, and nobody worked harder on the Labor Day program than he did,” Dowdy added. “He will be missed.”
Reed, a Paducah resident whose real name was Kenneth, died recently. He was 66. “Everybody called him ‘Bad Eye,‘” said Dowdy, who was also a longtime president of the Western Kentucky Labor Day Committee, the all- volunteer group that puts on the city's Labor Day weekend festivities.
Reed belonged to IAM Local Lodge 1720. He worked at the ISP Chemical plant in Calvert City from 1967 until he retired in 1994.
“'Bad Eye' Reed was what unions are all about,” said Jeff Wiggins, Council president. “From what I hear, there is no telling how many hours of his time he gave to make sure we had the best Labor Day program possible.“
Wiggins is also vice president of the Labor Day Committee. “Mr. Reed was a legend among veteran committee members,” he said.Return to Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council Home Page
Labor Day Committee is set to meet again on Jan. 25
The Western Kentucky Labor Day Committee will hold its first meeting of the New Year Jan. 25. The meeting is set for 6 p.m. at the Area Council Hall.
The committee puts on the city's annual Labor Day weekend program, including a downtown parade and a picnic at Carson Park , which features political speaking, a flea market and other activities.Return to Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council Home Page
Officer, Young Award nominees to be sought in January
Nominations for council officers will be accepted at the January council meeting. Jeff Wiggins, council president, plans to seek reelection.
The Young Award, named for the late W.C. Young, a national labor and civil rights leader from Paducah , is the highest honor the Area Council bestows. Wayne “Windy” Wallace was the 2004 Young Award recipient.
Return to Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council Home Page
The old-time GOP ‘Gospel of Greed' is a depression maker
By BERRY CRAIG, KEA-NEA/AFT Local 6038
It won't be a happy New Year for most members of Steelworkers Local 665 at the Continental-General Tire plant in Mayfield.
The factory is all but closing. For more than 40 years, it provided some of the best jobs in western Kentucky .
Continental, a German company, is “indefinitely suspending tire production” at its Mayfield factory. Tires that were made in Mayfield will be made abroad, in countries as far away as Brazil , the Czech Republic and Malaysia , according to the union.
Virtually turning out the lights at the Mayfield plant will blow a big hole in the local economy. So Continental probably hopes Mayfield will blame the “greedy” union for the plant's demise. Continental's greed shut the plant. The Steelworkers are trying to set the record straight.
“The problem is not with the Mayfield workforce, it is with the antiquated plant and facilities,” said John Sellers, executive vice president and head of the Steelworkers' Rubber/Plastics Industry Conference.
Sellers added that the company “complained that the Mayfield plant” had “the highest production costs in its plants in North America .” Even so, Continental didn't make “any proposals to reduce that cost short of indefinitely suspending tire production,” he said.
The union did its part to keep the plant at full capacity, according to Terry Beane, Local 665 president. He said the union “agreed to extend our contract and to accept workforce restructuring. All we asked was that the company make an equal commitment to invest in our plant and our community.”
Continental turned the union down.
Obviously, Continental believes it has the right to do as it pleases with the Mayfield plant. After all, the U.S. is a capitalist country.
So is Germany . “But Continental couldn't get away with this in Germany ,” said Jerry Irwin, a retired member of Local 665.
The German government believes that with rights come responsibilities. Thus, laws safeguarding workers and unions are stronger in Germany than in the U.S.
“It's all about money,” Irwin said. Beane agrees. “Continental's top management told our representatives that they would build tires wherever they could at minimum cost,” he said.
Members of Local 665 are among tens of thousands of U.S. union men and women who have lost their jobs to workers in low-wage countries. Companies that outsource production and ship jobs overseas save dollars in the short run. They might lose a lot more money in the long run.
To paraphrase the immortal Huck Finn, we've been here before.
In the 1920s, American business and industry operated on one basic principle: keep profits up, expenses down. The decade was dubbed “the Roaring 20s,” which implied that everybody was making a lot of money and having a good time. Most people weren't.
From 1923 to 1929, corporate profits jumped 62 percent and dividends 65 percent, according to historian William E. Leuchtenburg. Wages increased only 11 percent, he added.
Today, wages lag far behind corporate profits and dividends. Outsourcing and sending jobs out of the country are widening the gap between what bosses and stockholders are paid and what workers earn.
Union wages helped create American's huge middle class after World War II. They also helped fuel the most robust consumer economy in history.
America became a consumer society in the 1920s. Credit kept the economy going, but only for a while.
In 1929, the stock market crashed. The Great Depression followed. It was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history.
The greed of American business and industry caused the Depression. Because workers were paid so little, they ultimately couldn't afford the goods American business and industry produced. America 's “Captains of Industry” refused to share the wealth, and most of the country went broke.
In the 1920s, the Republicans ran the White House and Congress. The GOP preached the gospel of greed. What was good for business was good for the country, the Republicans said.
The GOP is still saying it. President George W. Bush thinks outsourcing can be good for the economy.
Viola Melton Winings does not. She is a Steelworker and a 67-year-old grandmother who lost her job to Mexico .
“The working class people are the ones who buy most of the new cars and the new televisions,” said Winings, a member of Steelworkers Local 13953. “Without good jobs we won't be able to buy what is being made overseas and shipped back to America .”
When enough Americans “aren't able to buy” we get a depression.Return to Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council Home Page
‘Mega-Union' proposal will likely be a hot topic in the New Year
The president of the Service Employees International Union and some other labor leaders want to merge the country's 60 or so unions into about 20 “mega-unions, a proposal that is sparking debate down to the grassroots.
“We talked about this at the December meeting,” said Jeff Wiggins Council president. “No doubt we will be talking about it a lot in the coming year.”
SEIU President Andy Stern thinks “the AFL-CIO is an antiquated body unprepared to meet the challenges of the 21st century,” wrote Richard Hurd, a Cornell University professor, in an article reprinted in a recent issue of the Kentucky Labor Voice . “Stern and a group of like-minded union leaders [are pressing]…for a dramatic makeover in labor's structure and strategic priorities. Their insistence that the AFL-CIO must be transformed — or must get out of the way — has outraged old-time, tradition-bound unionists and has ignited an internal feud that threatens to split the movement into warring factions.”
Hurd added, “These are difficult times for labor, and not just because of the election. The union share of the workforce has dropped to 8% in the private sector, the lowest level in 100 years and less than one-fourth of the post-World War II peak. Industrial unions have suffered under the weight of globalization, while their counterparts in transportation, communications and utilities have been weakened by deregulation. On top of this, labor faces an inhospitable legal environment made worse by an antagonistic president and Congress.”
Stern and like-minded union leaders have organized the New Unity Partnership. They include Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE! and John Wilhelm of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union .
Hurd wrote that the New Unity group argues “that the growing crisis requires an aggressive response…They have proposed collapsing the nation's 60-plus unions into no more than 20 powerful mega-unions.”
Other union leaders are opposed to the New Unity Partnership's ideas. The IAM has authorized its president, R. Thomas Buffenbarger, to pull out of the AFL-CIO if Stern's proposals are adopted, Hurd wrote. More labor leaders have voiced displeasure, including United Steelworkers of America President Leo Gerard, who has described the efforts of the NUP as presumptuous, Hurd also wrote.
Nearly half of the Council's officers belong to the Steelworkers or the IAM. Wiggins and Trustee Wayne Chambers are Steelworkers. Vice President Benny Adair, Recording Secretary Hardy Williams and Trustee David Childress are from the IAM. “One of the great things about the Area Council is that it is a place where we can all come together, debate important issues, and yet go out the door as union brothers and sisters,“ Wiggins said.