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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 8, Number 7, August, 2007
Steelworkers local memorialized on courthouse lawn
By BERRY CRAIG
The “Rock of Labor” found a good home.
“Years from now, some of our grandkids will see it and maybe not know what it is,” said Terry Beane, last president of Mayfield Steelworkers Local 665. “That will lead to some wonderful stories.”
Union memorials are rare on courthouse lawns. However, the Rock of Labor is the newest monument at the Graves County courthouse in Mayfield.
The 3,000-pound, rough-hewn brown boulder commemorates Local 665, the union at the big Continental-General Tire factory near Mayfield. The local represented hourly workers at the plant, which has closed.
Workers voted in the union shortly after the plant opened in 1960, manufacturing car and truck tires, mainly for auto makers in Detroit. Local 665 was part of the United Rubber Workers until the URW merged with the Steelworkers.
“Local 665 may be gone, but it won't be forgotten,” said Jeff Wiggins, a member of Steelworkers Local 9447-5 and president of the Western Kentucky Area Council in nearby Paducah. “We were happy to contribute the stone as a monument to our brothers and sisters who lost their jobs to corporate greed.”
General Tire and Rubber, an American company, opened the plant, but sold it to German-based Continental, one of the world's largest tire makers.
“Most of the tires that were made in Mayfield for years by workers earning good union wages are now being made in cheap-labor countries overseas,” Wiggins said. “But these tires won't be cheaper to consumers when they're imported and sold in the United States. Closing the Mayfield plant is another example of a big company putting profit ahead of people.”
The Area Council, which represents a number of unions in far western Kentucky, bought the stone several years ago. “We intended to turn it into a workers' memorial in Paducah,” Wiggins said.
Plans changed when the state AFL-CIO sold its headquarters in Frankfort and moved elsewhere in the state capital. “The official state Workers' Memorial was on the lawn,” said Wiggins, who is also on the state labor group's executive board. “Our council requested it, and we got it.”
With the state memorial on the way, the council wasn't sure what to do with the Rock of Labor. Wayne Chambers, Local 665 vice president and a council delegate, asked for the stone. He wanted to make it a monument to his union.
Council delegates voted unanimously to donate the Rock of Labor to Local 665. “That was one of the best things we ever did,” Wiggins said.
Beane praised Chambers for getting the monument to Mayfield. “Wayne was the driving force behind this,” he said. “He went to County Judge-Executive Tony Smith about it. Tony and the fiscal court agreed the courthouse lawn was a good place for the Rock of Labor.”
Chambers lined up Rick Miller, who owns a Mayfield monument company, to engrave the stone. “ROCK OF LABOR,” the inscription reads. “IN HONOR OF THE/ MEMBERS OF UNITED STEELWORKERS/ LOCAL-665/ SOLIDARITY FOREVER.”
Chambers and Beane presided at a June ceremony to dedicate the stone. The union officials said more than 100 people attended. Many in the crowd were Local 665 members, retirees and their families.
Several people spoke. They included County Commissioner Romey Holmes and State Rep. Fred Nesler. They worked at the plant and belonged to Local 665.
Other speakers were Joe Villines, Steelworkers District 8 staff representative; Danny Bruce and David Herndon, both ex-Local 665 presidents; and Wiggins.
"This is not the end for local USW 665, it is the beginning -- some
place to bring your children and grandchildren to show and share,” Wiggins said. “Terry and Wayne cared for their members more than they will ever know.”
Chambers thanked the Area Council, Judge Smith and the fiscal court. “It was great seeing people from other unions there, too,” he said.
They included Council Vice President Benny Adair and COPE director Howard “Bubba” Dawes, both Machinists; George Wiggins, a retired union firefighter and council trustee; and delegates Martha Wiggins and Frances Willey, both from AIM-UNITE! Chapter 22, a retirees group.
“It really gives me a warm feeling to see that monument when I drive by the courthouse,” he said.
The Rock of Labor is near smaller monuments to the Illinois Central Railroad and to veterans of Operation Desert Storm. “That's a good place for that rock,” the Mayfield Messenger quoted Chambers. “After the railroads started shutting down, the auto industry picked up the slack.
“And we built tires that went on military vehicles for Desert Storm. We had a mural painted in the Curing Department in honor of those tires. They were some of the best tires that they used…in Desert Storm.”
Chambers helped set the stone on a concrete pad the day before the dedication ceremony. A small chunk accidentally broke off. He saved it as a souvenir.
“I wish we could give our members more,” Beane said. “But that rock will be theirs forever.”
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Wiggins says Bunning sounds like a paranoid politician
Jeff Wiggins, Area Council president, says Sen. Jim Bunning's warning that he may stop coming to the Fancy Farm picnic ‘”is a big joke.”
Wiggins added, “He and his buddy Mitch McConnell started all of the nastiness at the picnic by their own mean-spirited comments against Democrats and by bringing in busloads of these far right-wingers – a lot of them kids – to scream and wave signs against Democrats.”
Bunning told the Associated Press that the annual political picnic – set for Saturday is “totally and completely out of control.” Wiggins said, “If that's true, he has nobody to blame but himself and his pal, Mitch.”
Wiggins urged union members and their families to go to the picnic, the traditional start of the fall political campaign in Kentucky. “We should be respectful to these anti-labor Republicans, though they don't respect us and what we stand for,” he said.
At the same time, he said, “we also need to show our support – loud and clear – for our union endorsed candidates.” They include Democrats Steve Beshear for Governor, Dan Mongiardo for lieutenant governor, Jack Conway for attorney general, Crit Luallen for auditor, Todd Hollenbach for state treasurer and Bruce Hendrickson for secretary of state.
“We have a golden opportunity to help elect every one of these candidates,” Wiggins said. “The people of our state are tired of the Republicans and their anti-worker and anti-family agenda.”
He said it is especially important to put Beshear in the governor's mansion. “Ernie Fletcher is one of the most anti-union governors in Kentucky history,” Wiggins said. “He is also one of the most corrupt.”
Wiggins said that while Sen. McConnell had tried to distance himself from Fletcher, who was indicted, “Ernie was Mitch's hand-picked boy for governor. We've also got a great chance to ditch Mitch next year. He and Bunning are two of the most anti-union senators in Washington.”
Wiggins also called Bunning's remarks “those of a paranoid politician. They are also insulting to the good people of Fancy Farm and the Graves County sheriff's department, who we know will do a good job of keeping order at the picnic.”Return to Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council Home Page
George W. Bush has made greed the national gospel
By ROBYN BLUMNER
tampabay.com
Who are we? asks filmmaker Michael Moore in the movie Sicko. It is a question I have been asking myself lately.
Moore asks the existential question relative to the kind of society Americans have. Why don't we have a national health care system on a par with other Western democracies? Why do we allow private health insurers to insert a profit motive into denying necessary care to sick people? What is it about American culture that has tolerated and even defended this abolition of responsibility to one another?
This brought me to a larger puzzle: What is American culture? When I randomly ask people I know this question, "hot dogs" comes up with rather distressing frequency.
I think it is undisputable that this nation's greatness emanated from its cultural roots in the Enlightenment. We as a people have few outward characteristics in common, but we share a set of understandings that have largely liberated human beings to live up to their potential. This includes a fealty to reason, the rule of law, individual rights, popular sovereignty, the common good and equal opportunity. With these cornerstones, American society was built. Even as we amalgamated our cultural soup with every new wave of immigrants, we held on to those core understandings.
But these ideas almost sound quaint today. The Bush administration has done more damage to our national identity than any one before it. You can't be a nation of equal justice when the president has eyes only for the fairness of process for loyalists like Scooter Libby. You can't have the rule of law when the vice president claims laws don't apply to him. You can't have a nation of reason when the government elevates faith and politics over fact and science. And you can't have equal opportunity or a common good when the rules are rigged to solidify ever larger gains for those at the top. President Bush has substituted our Enlightenment values for his own: Crass materialism (go shopping to show your love of country), class privilege, anti-intellectualism, cronyism, religious zealotry and American exceptionalism.
Without leadership to express a conceptual vision of the best of who we are, we have moved from a nation of ideas to one of things. Creature comforts and entertainment products define American culture as much as our Constitution once did. McDonald's and Xboxes are our ambassadors. We have been drifting in this direction long before Bush came to office, but his personal and political instincts accelerated it.
This change in our national character can be laid at the feet of government. When large numbers of people suddenly feel left behind by an increasingly stratified economy, they start struggling to appear not to be among the losers. Accumulating things is one way to convince ourselves that we are still ensconced in the middle class. A prize-winning book by Michael Adams on the growing differences in the values of Americans and Canadians says that Americans are becoming more self-involved, focusing on personal needs and one's own survival in society rather than broader social values.
That shift is inevitable when your government no longer appears to be on your side.
Moore clues us in to how Americans have been scared off of single-payer health care, one of the government benefits that gives Canadians and Europeans great peace of mind. The medical establishment called it "socialized medicine," raising the specter of Communism.
Even cowboy actor Ronald Reagan was enlisted to paint it as anti-American. Its cousin, a plan for universal coverage offered during the Clinton years, was killed dead by Republicans in the service of entrenched interests.
Then Moore points to other "socialized" services that Americans have come to expect as a benefit of citizenship. Things like police and fire protection, public schools and libraries, the postal service. When we are victims of crime we expect the government to help. Why not when we are victims of a heart attack?
Even in our romanticized past when our heroes were quintessential individualists, such as Daniel Boone, America's go-it-alone spirit and limitless opportunity was built on the free land granted homesteaders by the government.
The original G.I. Bill helped put millions of returning veterans through college, even granting them a monthly stipend above tuition costs.
When we think nostalgically of the mid-20th century, we're remembering a time when government was a partner of the middle class, protecting workers, providing an economic launching pad for success and demanding through progressive taxation a shared prosperity.
Who are we now is not who we were. American culture is barely definable anymore. The go-go 1980s somehow convinced us that greed is good, and that a caring society is weak.
Building on this, Bush's "ownership society" is really a "you're on your own society." It's disturbing, harmful and more than a little bit sicko .
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