USW: Palin Rhetoric Embraces Unions, Yet She Backs McCain’s Anti-Worker Agenda

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/10/09/usw-palin-rhetoric-embraces-unions-yet-she-backs-mccains-anti-worker-agenda/

by James Parks, Oct 9, 2008

Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin can’t have it both ways. She should either denounce Sen. John McCain’s anti-worker policies or stop bragging about her husband’s union membership, says United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard.

When McCain introduced Palin as his running mate, he boasted that her husband, Todd, was a USW member. Palin later has said that her family had no health insurance until she and Todd got union jobs. Yet Palin supports the agenda of McCain, who has opposed practically every pro-worker issue to come up for more than two decades.

In two blogs on Huffington Post, Gerard, exposes and denounces McCain’s cynical manipulation of the union issue. Click here to read Gerard’s post, “Joe Six-Pack Demands Answers from Anti-Union McCain & Co.,” and here for “Sarah Palin, Explain Yourself, or Stop Using the USW as a Prop.”

What doesn’t make sense is for the anti-union McCain campaign to be boasting about the benefits of union membership. Like many Republicans, McCain has made it clear that he feels about unions the way an Alaskan aerial hunter does about wolves—best when dead.

Like the leaders of the AFL-CIO and presidents of many affiliated unions, Gerard is traveling the country to let union members know that this could be the most pivotal election of our time. Gerard and union leaders are telling union members that we cannot afford four more years of the Republican policies that have destroyed our economy and devastated our communities.

And they are pointing out McCain’s record of anti-worker positions:

* McCain has condemned unions as “serious excesses” and said government workers are “crippled by the fine print of the latest union contract.”
* McCain helped block the Employee Free Choice Act, which would level the playing field and give workers options on how to choose a union.
* McCain voted to block a bill that would have protected American strikers against companies hiring permanent replacements—a safeguard for workers that is normal in other industrialized nations.
* McCain has jeopardized workers’ retirement security by championing Bush’s privatization scheme for Social Security.
* McCain has voted for every American-job-killing free trade deal, without regard to human rights or environmental standards.

Despite his long anti-worker record, McCain is cynically trying to portray himself as a friend of working Americans, Gerard points out:

Suddenly, when he needs the middle-class vote, John S. McCain is trying to convert himself into John L. Lewis. It’s like his position on regulation. He was Mr. Deregulation until Wall Street collapsed. Now, he’s all for it.

Gerard says it’s one thing for Palin to acknowledge that her family was without health insurance until she and Todd joined unions. But the McCain health insurance plan, which she supports, would tax workers’ union-negotiated employer health care plans, which would cost a typical two-wage earner family $1,119 in higher taxes by 2013 and $2,809 in higher taxes by 2018, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund.

FULL story at link.

http://www.actblue.com/page/aflcio60?refcode=1010jjs

Help Us Get 60 Pro-worker Votes in the Senate

by the AFL-CIO community