Kentucky Activists Launch Campaign for New Governor

Bernard Pollack, AFL-CIO field coordinator, sends us this report on the launch of a campaign to elect a working family-friendly governor in Kentucky. 

Eighty-five activists from at least 25 unions and several central labor councils attended the Labor 2007 Kentucky kickoff meeting in Louisville yesterday to launch a member-to-member program in support of gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear.

The current governor of Kentucky, Ernie Fletcher, has tried to push right-to-work-for-less legislation, opposes collective bargaining for public employees and consistently is wrong on prevailing wages. 

Bashear helped kick off the meeting, along with Kentucky AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan, by telling labor leaders:

The single best way you help me win is to do what you do best—talk with your members on the phone, at the worksite, using local union mail and at the door.

Participants watched a video of Kentucky labor leaders discussing the importance of our member-to-member program in our collective effort to defeat Fletcher.

Londrigan was joined on the video by UFCW Local 227 President Gary Best, UAW CAP Director Connie Thurman, United Steelworkers (USW) District 8 Director Billy Thompson, and State Building Trades Director Larry Roberts. 

We unveiled a detailed calendar plan for the campaign’s next four months, emphasizing some of the program’s core strengths—local union mail, union newsletter articles, worksite leaflets, phones banks and labor walks. Additionally, union leaders heard about the plan that Working America is implementing to recruit tens of thousands of new members in Louisville.

By the close of the meeting, leader after leader stood up and committed to work the Labor 2007 program with all the labor unions in Kentucky. Nearly every union represented in the room also signed a pledge declaring their intention to move all elements of the 10-point program.

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Paid for by AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Treasury Fund.

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