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Palpable Change That's Gonna Come:
Barack Obama Will Keep Our Issues Front and Center
(9/4/08)


        (Continued from the AFSCME 48 home page)

    How’s this for a demonstration of heartfelt commitment: AFSCME plans to mobilize more members and invest more resources than ever before to help Obama win the White House. “We will turn out an army of 40,000 AFSCME activists to knock on doors, make phone calls and talk with their co-workers and neighbors to produce an unprecedented turnout in the 2008 election.,” McEntee said.

    The record shows … O.K., so Sen. Obama offers the potential to be a change agent and can be the working families champion we’ve so sorely lacked in the White House. What’s he said and done to indicate and/or demonstrate that?

    As a U.S. senator, he’s been a staunch advocate for critically important legislation to help working families. Among them: the Employee Free Choice Act, which would enable more Americans to improve their lives by joining a union to negotiate for better wages and benefits — a measure that Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, opposes — and expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to provide health coverage for an additional 10 million children from low-income families. Sen. Obama also opposes McCain’s plans to privatize Social Security and vital public services.

    “Barack Obama is a proven fighter on the issues our members care about most, such as ending privatization, providing state and local fiscal relief, fully funding and supporting public services and the workers who provide them, and guaranteeing that everyone in our country has access to quality, affordable health care they can count on,” McEntee said.

    And then there are qualities that don’t necessarily show up in the box score, such as his ability to connect and, ultimately, rekindle collective passion in the issues that matter most.

    “The main reason I’ve been for Obama from the start is this: It seems that he has a capacity to mobilize the energy of young voters and I think that’s really important at this time in history — it’s really time for a ‘changing of the guard,’” said AFSCME Local 1091 President Sue Blaustein. “I think he’s more likely to be a president who can gather creative, thinking people around him, who aren’t stuck in the same old modes of thinking and doing things.”

    In his own words ... He’s also more likely to (1) actually get what it is that public employees do, and why they do it; and (2) lead this country with that same recognition of “service” and respect for same.

     As Sen. Obama himself put it (via videoconference) to your AFSCME brothers and sisters at the San Francisco convention on July 31: “In these last few years, we’ve continued to work together on fights from raising the minimum wage to making sure shareholders have a say on executive pay. There’s one fight, in particular, that I’ll always remember:

    “In March of last year, a green-clad AFSCME army carrying signs declaring “It’s Time for Justice” rallied in Chicago for the 8,000 health care service workers at Resurrection Health Care who didn’t have a voice. They’ve been trying to form a union with AFSCME Council 31 but again and again were met with resistance from management. It was there that I met a remarkable woman named Shirley Brown. Shirley, a housekeeping employee at Resurrection Hospital, helped lead that fight. But she wasn’t just fighting for her fundamental right to join a union; she was fighting her own battle against cancer.

    “When I met her that day, she was still weak from the radiation and the chemo therapy. But she was determined to speak. And as she reached the podium, something changed. With her back straight and her head held high and her eyes clear, she told 2,000 AFSCME members why she fought. She said she fought because she had co-workers at Resurrection who couldn’t afford the Resurrection health care plan — [workers] who didn’t receive the wages that they deserve, and who were fired just for publicly supporting the union. Resurrection refused to guarantee her a full-time position once she recovered. But because her co-workers rallied around her, because they all came to work wearing buttons with her face on them, management recanted and gave Shirley her job back when she finally beat her cancer.

    “See, that’s how Shirley found the strength to stand up at that rally. She found hope in the union, and in her co-workers who came together for her. Whenever I think about Shirley, and about the workers who rallied to her side, I’m reminded that for all the pettiness that too often passes for politics in Washington, what holds this country together is that fundamental belief that we all have a stake in each other. That I am my brother’s keeper. That I am my sister’s keeper.

    “That’s the idea that led me to enter public service more than two decades ago. That led me to turn down more lucrative jobs so I could work with a group of churches on the south side of Chicago to give job training to the jobless and hope to the hopeless after local steel plants closed. The idea that’s lived out each day by first responders in New York City and corrections officers in Iowa … highway workers in Ohio … health care workers in California. By all the AFSCME members across the country who work with our children and our elderly … who fix our public infrastructure … who help the sick and disabled … who aren’t nameless, faceless government employees but the public servants we depend on to make America work. And it’s the idea we need to reclaim from the most anti-labor in our memory.”

    Why Obama? It’s pretty simple, really.

    “We can elect a champion for working families or we can elect John McCain and have four more years of George W. Bush’s disastrous policies,” McEntee said. “When you look at McCain’s record on the issues instead of his rhetoric on the stump, it’s obvious that he’s just another Bush. McCain and the high-priced lobbyists who run his campaign promise us four more years of destructive economic policies at home and 100 more years of occupation in Iraq. We need a change now.”

    During the primary season, AFSCME activists clearly demonstrated how hard they plan to work during the next 90 days or so. “When we make an endorsement, we back it up with everything we’ve got,” McEntee said.

    And there’ll be plenty of opportunities to get involved. For more information, call AFSCME Take Back America Project Organizer Ryan Neibauer at 414-344-6868 (ext. 240) or 414-333-1606 (cell); or email at rneibauer@wiafscme.org.


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