Holt Baker: Union Households Can Decide Election

by James Parks, Oct 28, 2008

After a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and Rep. John Conyers reflect on Martin Luther King Jr.’s support for workers.
Workers in Miami rally to get out the early vote for Barack Obama.

The AFL-CIO is mobilizing for the largest get-out-the-vote effort in its history. All 250,000 union volunteers are working extra hard to make sure union members make the difference next Tuesday and turn this country around. AFL-CIO top officers are spending these last days reminding union members across the country of what is at stake on Nov. 4—good jobs, affordable health care and the future of the middle class.

Last weekend, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker was joined in Youngstown, Ohio, by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), who urged union members to keep working hard right through Nov. 4 to ensure that worker-friendly candidates are elected. Holt Baker also traveled to Mississippi, Georgia and Florida. In Miami, she joined with union members in a rally to boost early voting.    

Describing this as the most important election in our lifetimes, Holt Baker told the workers that union households can decide this election. 

We cannot take four more years. We have to win. There is no alternative. 

With so little time left, we have to shift into higher gear. This is an election where voters need a personal touch from people they know and trust—nobody has more respect and credibility among your members than you.

The key issue, she points out, is the nation’s economic disaster and the clear difference in the way Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain would address the crisis.

We’re doing our work in the middle of this crazy financial meltdown. People have to understand that McCain was a chief architect of banking deregulation legislation 10 years ago. And he supports privatizing Social Security. Think where we’d be if George Bush’s and John McCain’s privatization scheme had gone through and put Social Security funds into the stock market. 

Our message from now through the end of the election is Barack Obama will bring us the change we need and John McCain will bring us more of the same.

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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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