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Executive Council Meeting Focuses on Election Drive
The AFL-CIO Executive Council kicks off its summer meeting tomorrow in Chicago with Election Day, Nov. 4, at the top of the agenda. The labor leaders will spend a large portion of the two-day meeting finalizing the strategy and details for the last 90 days of Labor 2008, the union movement’s largest voter mobilization ever.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Ted Kennedy Jr.—standing in for his father Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) who is undergoing cancer treatment—will be in Chicago to address the council tomorrow. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), endorsed by the AFL-CIO and backed by labor, will speak to the council via teleconference.
A major focus of the political discussions will center on informing union voters—who in key battleground states make up as much as 25 percent to 35 percent of the electorate—about Obama’s strong support for working family issues and Sen. John McCain’s long anti-working family record.
The other key component of Labor 2008 is getting out the union vote (GOTV), not just to elect Obama but to also elect pro-worker lawmakers up and down the ballot, including “60 in the Senate.” That is the number of votes needed in the new Congress to block expected Republican filibusters of working family legislation such as the Employee Free Choice Act and health care reform.
(Tonight, in a special reception, council members will meet with several U.S. Senate hopefuls who are in races to unseat a number of anti-worker incumbents.)
Both the GOTV and voter information efforts rely on member-to-member communication at the worksites, doors and on the telephones. The council will finalize the details of a program that already this year has distributed more than 4.3 million worksite fliers and made more than 70,000 member-to-member home visits and hundreds of thousands of phone calls.
There is also a special emphasis on the union vote in battleground states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. As prelude to the Executive Council meeting, more than 300 union activists and leaders met yesterday in a special Battleground States Conference to map out the final push in those states.
AFL-CIO Media Affairs specialist Steve Smith reports on the conference kickoff:
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka delivered an impassioned address on the labor movement’s role in combating racism in this election. Trumka’s remarks sparked frank discussion….Ros Pelles, director of the AFL-CIO Civil, Human and Women’s Rights Department, outlined the joint Labor 2008 voter protection strategy to ensure all eligible voters are allowed to vote and that their votes are counted.
Voter protection is on the Executive Council’s agenda Wednesday when NAACP President Benjamin Jealous addresses the meeting. The NAACP, the AFL-CIO and several other groups are working together on a large-scale voter protection program.
Along with the elections strategy, the council will examine the latest developments in the fight for health care reform, winning a union voice at work, education, immigration reform and more issues.
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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
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3 Comments
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Give your police department your support, until the Federal government sign into law the SAVE ACT. Read the undeniable facts that Illegal Immigration for three decades has flooded America with poverty. It looks like it will never stop. Unless the American people demand the exodus of the millions that are already here. Then stop those waiting patiently to slip through the undermanned border fence. Only the enactment of the Federal SAVE ACT (H.R.4088) enforcement only. Just read the traumatic, severe financial impact of growing issue. Overpopulation, congestion, urban sprawl, pollution, environmental damage, crime, diminishing resources, contagious Diseases, lack of affordable housing, depressed wages, underground economic, fraudulent documents, identity theft, tax evasion, soaring crime rate, increased tax burdens, overcrowded schools, uneducated citizen children, overcrowded prisons, inadequate health care.
The balkanization of our communities and a large and growing population with loyalty to other Nations. Just read this disturbing revelation of costs, (www.eagleforum.org/sources) Read the undeniable economic statistics at http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/taxes.asp) Read hard suppressed facts at (www.numbersusa. com).
Since I live in California, I deal daily with all of the problems described by Britannicus. Unfortunately,our own citizens are just as responsible for these blights on our civilization.The high unemployment rate, housing crunch, and lack of health care coverage is not solely due to the illegal population. In fact, the outsourcing of many jobs, profiteering and speculation in real estate, and erosion of employee benefits by greedy corporate employers has had a lot to do with some of the societal ills we face.
Good jobs, responsible employers,safe, affordable housing,and healthy communities—aren’t these the things we all want? People have come here for hundreds of years looking for a better way of life, found a path to citizenship, and become contributing members of American society. There have been illegal immigrants for many decades, from Europe and Asia and Africa and South and Central America. Some come as students and never leave; some come on vacation and some just come to try their luck—but they would leave tomorrow if there were no jobs. There are plenty of employers who are happy to have a worker to exploit, and a Dept. of Labor who is too busy protecting us from our unions to care.
Are we so easily led astray by wedge issues that we lose sight of common goals? Americans need to stay focused on the economic issues that have consequences for us all, legal and illegal alike! Those of us who are citizens, registered to vote, need to go to the polls with a purpose that transcends some hot-button issue of the day—we need to cast our votes in a way that give our children and ourselves some hope for the future.
We enjoy a lot of freedom as Americans. We have seen our personal freedom slowly erode since 9/11, and the politics of fear have kept us on alert. But our lives haven’t been impacted as much by terrorism from abroad as they have by price gouging at the gas pump ,or the fear of losing one’s home from a bad loan by an unscrupulous lender. Now people are trying to turn immigrants into the new bogey man!
Don’t lose your humanity, America! Vote for the candidate who knows what working families need—Barack Obama.
Catbear955 much of what you say is true. Britanicus also has a point,but continueing to vote for the people that will not enforce our laws and would like to lessen the penalties for ones that have broken them is not the answer either.We must get out of this Democrat, Republican rut we have built for ourselves,because if we do not this country is doomed.Party politics must stop, join us as an Independent and let’s see if we can make some real changes,vote against incumbents.Maybe in the election four years from now some real change can be made to happen.