Union Members Confront McCain in San Francisco

Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain spent a few days in California in March, holding closed-door, big-dollar fundraisers with his corporate cronies—but he got more than he bargained for. Union members were at each event, calling him out on his anti-worker record.

McCain held a fundraiser at the Ritz Carlton Hotel March 26 for donors paying $2,300 each to hear the Arizona senator, while outside a group of union members and anti-war activists held signs and chanted to let their fellow Californians know that McCain is wrong for working families. The protest was featured on local TV news.

Tim Paulson, executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council, said that McCain is out of touch with working families, and there’s no better evidence than McCain’s speech on the housing crisis, in which he offered no proposals to address the crisis. “John McCain, as we know, would be a disaster for working men and women,” Paulson said. “Just last month alone, there were 57,000 foreclosures in the state, and he’s on record as blaming homeowners for this subprime crisis.”

The AFL-CIO’s new McCain Revealed campaign was also launched last month to expose McCain’s rhetoric versus the truth of his record. McCain admits that he doesn’t have much interest in, or knowledge about, the domestic issues that matter to working families. His statements about trade, health care and jobs and his decades of anti-working family votes in Congress make it clear that he can’t and won’t be the leader we need to turn around America, the AFL-CIO says.

Members of Engineers and Scientists of California Local 20 led chants of “Outsource McCain, not our jobs.”

Among those protesting McCain at the Ritz-Carlton were members of the California Federation of Teachers Local 2121 from City College of San Francisco, public school teachers represented by the United Educators of San Francisco, and members of the Engineers and Scientists of California Local 20. ESC Local 20 represents almost 300 engineers, technologists, and specialists at United Airlines. ESC members led chants of “Outsource McCain, not our jobs.” They told news reporters that McCain lobbied in support of a foreign firm for a $35 billion contract to build air tankers for the Pentagon. The contract was awarded to the French company Airbus over Boeing, where the ESC’s international union, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, represents 25,000 workers.

The union members were joined at the rally by young anti-war activists from The World Can’t Wait and International ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism), who protested McCain’s support for the Iraq War and his votes to allow torture of detainees in the endless war on terror.

McCain Revealed

The AFL-CIO has produced a McCain Communications Toolkit as part of its Campaign. The Toolkit explains why McCain would be a disaster for working families if he is elected president. Check www.McCainRevealed.com for more details. Among the highlights, exposing McCain’s record:

McCain Will Not Protect Workers’ Rights. Sen. John McCain is clearly not a fan of workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for better wages and benefits. He has spoken out against unions and consistently voted against collective bargaining rights for workers. Union members know the right to bargain is essential to preserving good jobs with good wages and benefits.
McCain has repeatedly attacked teachers’ unions. “It’s time to break the grip of the education monopoly that serves the union bosses at the expense of our children,” he said. [The New York Times, 2/11/00]

Senator McCain’s anti-labor record includes voting against the Employee Free Choice Act, voting to allow employers to hire permanent replacements during a strike, voting against collective bargaining rights for state and local police and firefighters as well as TSA Screeners, voting against a clean minimum wage increase, voting against protections for workers’ overtime rights, voting to gut the Family and Medical Leave Act, and opposing applying Davis-Bacon to federal disaster areas. He also voted against authorizing $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2002 to help states and local school districts repair their most dilapidated public school buildings.

McCain supported tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans—voting for a budget reconciliation bill in 2005 that included a $60 billion tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, with more than three quarters of the benefits going to families with $100,000 or more in annual income.

Sen. McCain also has a long history of supporting the kind of trade deals that have devastated our economy and sent our jobs overseas.

“I know NAFTA was a good idea,” McCain told the Des Moines Register leading up to the Iowa caucuses. “It has created millions of jobs and it has helped the economies of all three of these nations. All you have to do is go to Detroit and see the trucks lined up every day or go to our southern border. There have been winners and losers. And that’s the problem. But free trade is something that I think is vital to America.”

McCain continues to proclaim his support for new trade agreements despite evidence of how harmful agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA have been. He supported allowing China to enter the WTO despite its horrible worker safety and product safety record, exposing our children to toxic toys and our families to contaminated food.

McCain has added insult to injury by voting against measures intended to help stem the flow of jobs lost due to these agreements, showing he is out of touch with the realities working people confront. He continues to support policies that devastate communities, and union members continue to confront him along the campaign trail. For recent news of union members protesting McCain’s anti-worker record, check www.aflcio.org.