IBEW Union Leaders: Don’t Take Your Prejudice to the Voting Booth

Edwin Hill, IBEW president

Barb Kucera, editor of Workday Minnesota, sends us this report from a recent meeting of more than 300 Electrical Workers (IBEW) activists mobilizing in key Midwestern states to help elect Barack Obama.

To ensure Sen. Barack Obama wins the White House, IBEW and other union members need to talk with co-workers and “take a personal stand,” says IBEW President Edwin Hill.

In a Rochester, Minn., meeting with 300 IBEW leaders and activists from Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, Hill described the union’s nationwide mobilization strategy in the weeks remaining before the Nov. 4 election. The worksite is the bull’s-eye of the mobilization target.

We’re not leaving anything to chance. Take the union leaflets, papers, take the handouts, take it to ‘em at work. Make sure people see them. But don’t forget the personal touch. Brothers and sisters, don’t let your courage fail now!

Hill praised Obama and had harsh words about the Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, and the shallowness of their campaign.

It’s like they’re running as king and queen of the prom instead of talking about the issues. People are falling out of the middle class every day. Unemployment is killing us….Two oil men in the White House took the price of gas from $1.50 to over $4 a gallon….It’s like we’ve been governed by Murphy’s Law and everything that could go wrong is going wrong.

McCain, said Hill, promises more of the same, while Obama will support working families and rebuild the fractured economy.

Both Hill and IBEW Secretary-Treasurer Lindell Lee said they don’t underestimate the effect of the anti-Obama smear campaign—or potential racism against an African American candidate. But they believe concern about jobs will trump these other factors. Said Hill:

I think the issues are too big this year for the lies and distortions to overcome.

Lee told the group about a recent conversation he had with a white IBEW member from the south.

He told me, “Up until now, being prejudiced has been free. You could dislike or even hate people for no other reason than the color of their skin and it wouldn’t cost you anything financially—although it might cost you morally or spiritually.” Then he went on to say, “But if middle-class working Americans take their prejudice into the voting booth on Nov. 4, it will cost them dearly for decades.”

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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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