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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 2, February, 2005
Steele, Foley square off for financial secretary-treasurer
The president and former vice president of PACE Local 5-550 at the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant are candidates for council financial secretary-treasurer.
The names of Philip Foley, Local 5-550 president, and Donna Steele, who was the union’s vice president, will be on the ballot when the council meets and elects new officers Feb. 3.
“Bonnie Edwards, our current financial secretary-treasurer, chose not to run again because of Aaron’s illness,” said Jeff Wiggins, USWA Local 9447-5, council president. Aaron Edwards is her husband.
Bonnie Edwards, a member of AIM-UNITE! Chapter 22, will run for trustee, a post Steele held.
All other officers will run unopposed for additional terms, said Wiggins, who wants to continue as president. Others seeking reelection include Vice President Benny Adair, IAM 1720; Recording Secretary Hardy Williams, Retirees’ Council; and Trustees Wayne Chambers, USWA 665; Lewis Hicks, PACE 5-680; and David Childress, IAM 1294.
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Lewis Hicks is nominated for 2005 O.K. Young Award
Lewis Hicks, PACE Local 5-680, is the first nominee for this year's W.C. Young Award. Others may be nominated at the February council meeting, said Jeff Wiggins, council president.
Named for the late W.C. Young, a national labor and civil rights leader from Paducah, the award is the highest honor the Area Council bestows.
Hicks is a council trustee and is also mayor of La Center. He was grand marshal of the 2004 Paducah Labor Day parade.
Council delegates make nominations for the award. The executive board chooses the recipient, who is honored at a dinner program.
Young was the first award winner. Last year's recipient was Wayne “Windy”' Wallace.
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Local union members, families are asked to skip ‘Miss Saigon'
Area union members and their families are urged not to attend the Feb. 4 and 5 non-Equity road production of “Miss Saigon” at the Four Rivers Performing Arts Center.
The musical is on the AFL-CIO's national boycott list at the request of the of the Actors' Equity Association, the union that represents 45,000 stage actors and stage managers in live productions.
“It is important that we show our solidarity with AEA and give ‘Miss Saigon' a pass,” said Jeff Wiggins, Area Council president. “We also need to spread the word that this is a non-Equity production.”
“Miss Saigon” is a production of Big League Theatricals and the company's second road show on the AFL-CIO boycott list. The road production of “The Music Man” was added to the list in 2001.
According to the union, producers believe they can make more money on the road than on Broadway. Consequently, they are increasingly entering into licensing agreements with non-Equity producers to avoid contractual agreements for Equity shows, the AFL-CIO said.
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Machinists Local 1720 says thanks to many strike supporters
Solidarity – that old union byword – stretched beyond the picket line during the recent strike at the ISP chemical plant in Calvert City.
“The support for IAM Local 1720 was tremendous,” said Jeff Wiggins, council president. “Many, many businesses and individuals outside the local donated food, soft drinks, a heater, LP gas, firewood and more.”
Benny Adair agreed. “The businesses, individuals and other union brothers and sisters who helped knew we were out on the street for a reason,” said Adair, council vice president and member of Local 1720. “We thank them.” Helpers included:
Sharon O'Daniel, Eric Jackson, Godfather's Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Subway, Veda Parrott, Kentucky Lake Motor Speedway, Calvert City Eagles Club, Bill James, Purity Party Ice, Bailey's Gulf Station, Degussa plant PACE union local, Bruce Redd, Brian Roy, Parker's Quick Lube, Bruce Fiser, Paducah VFW, Brenda Gentry, Gerald Parker, Jet-A-Marina, Break Time Vending, Shop-O-Rama, Little Bo Peep, Draffen Supply, Calvert Lumber, Wynn Lumber, Red's Donuts, IAM Local 1969,
Possum Trot Mini Mart, B&A Salvage, Charles W. Riley, Bobby Mann, Pizza by the Pound, Quality Carrier, Kroger and Super Valu UFCW Local 227, Eddyville Food Giant, Camp-A-Rama, Smoky's Restaurant, Laurie Osbourne, Terry Uvanni, Hancock's Neighborhood Market, Sarah DeFew, Old Kountry Barbecue, PCI Performance, Mike Stewart, Joe Phelps, Van Faith, Bubba Dawes, Calvert City Food Giant, Bonnie Borders, IAM Local 2507, Betty and Gordon Burch,
Cakes by Design, Calvert City Quick Lube, Trimac, Draffenville Elks Lodge 2707, John the Greek, James Neal, Hardees, Reno's, Grace's Barbecue, Glenda Adair, Signal Industrial Products, Anita Parrot and Andy Lyles.
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GOP, conservatives ‘talk Christ…walk corporate' and win
By BERRY CRAIG, KEA-NEA/AFT Local 6038
Constitutional amendments to outlaw abortion and gay marriage weren’t cited among President George W. Bush’s second-term goals in a recent Associated Press story. “Old-fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is an economic regimen of low wages and lax regulations,” writes journalist Thomas Frank in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives won the Heart of America.
Still wondering why a third of union members voted to reelect Bush? Read Frank’s book. Better yet, buy a copy for a union brother or sister who pulled the Republican lever Nov. 2.
What’s the Matter with Kansas tells how conservatives have whipped up what Frank calls “the Great Backlash” against liberalism. Conservatives hustle God-fearing working people every election, sell them out, then get their votes again, and again, he writes.
According to the AP story, Bush priorities are “to simplify tax laws, partially privatize Social Security and rein in medical liability lawsuits.” In other words, the president wants to give more tax breaks to rich people, start getting rid of Social Security and make it harder for folks of modest means to get fair compensation from doctors and hospitals when their foul ups threaten, or claim, lives and limbs.
Abortion and gay marriage are wedge issues the Bushites used to split the working-class vote once more. The fact that conservatives like Bush “talk Christ…but walk corporate” ought to rile conservative Christians, many of them union members in states like Kentucky and Frank’s native Kansas.
“Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people,” Frank writes. Today’s conservatives are savvier than the Robber Barons of old and their Social Darwinist brethren in politics and the pulpit. The Bushites don’t invoke “the divine right of money or [demand]…that the lowly learn their place in the great chain of being,” Frank writes.
Instead, conservatives portray liberals -- who consistently support labor unions and who believe government has a duty to help the poor and powerless against the rich and powerful -- as Birkenstock-shod, vegetarian Eastern intellectuals or sex- and drug-crazed Hollywood hedonists out of touch with red state, red-meat Middle America. “…Backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics,” Frank writes. “The movement’s basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern -- that Values Matter Most, as one backlash title has it.”
He adds, “ Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation.
“ Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.”
It is also beyond imagining how the Republicans can make so many working people vote against their jobs and their unions. Conservatives, according to Frank, have sprung “a political trap so devastating to the interests of Middle America that even the most diabolical of string-pullers would have trouble dreaming it up. Here, after all, is a rebellion against ‘the establishment' that has wound up abolishing the tax on inherited estates.
“Here is a movement whose response to the power structure is to make the rich even richer; whose answer to the inexorable degradation of working-class life is to lash out angrily at labor unions and liberal workplace-safety programs; whose solution to the rise of ignorance in America is to pull the rug out from under public education.”
Frank fears the worst in yet to come. “…You can't help but wonder how much farther it's all going to go,” he concludes. “My guess is, quite a bit.”
Kansas, Frank's Republican red state home was once rife with reformers -- abolitionists, Populists, Socialists, labor radicals and other upsetters of establishment apple carts. Today, Kansas is among the reddest of the red states and home to the poorest county in America, which gave Bush more than 80 percent of its vote in 2000.
“Kansas is ready to lead us singing into the apocalypse,” he writes. “It invites us all to join in, to lay down our lives so that others might cash out at the top; to renounce forever our middle-American prosperity in pursuit of a crimson fantasy of middle-American righteousness.”
Sadly, the Bluegrass State, another red state, is marching in lockstep with the Sunflower State and crooning the same tune. “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,” Frank writes.
That dream is a nightmare for the working-class. One in three union members helped keep it going last November.