A Time to Rebuild
Message from UAW President Ron Gettelfinger
On behalf of the International Executive Board, I want to thank the thousands of UAW members who actively worked to elect the UAW-endorsed candidates in the November elections. We worked at phone banks and campaign headquarters; we walked neighborhoods and precincts; and we talked to our family, friends and co-workers about the issues.
Congratulations to the 27 UAW members who won local and state elections. We’re counting on you to fight for working families.
It’s been estimated that Big Business outspent worker-friendly advocates by a 12-to-1 margin. That translates into $710 million spent by corporate interests to promote their candidates.
Politics should be about choosing a direction for this country, about our hopes, dreams and vision for a better America. Politics should be about making a difference in our day-to-day lives, in the lives of our children and in the lives of our parents. But in these elections, we were offered no clear choices other than which candidates had the most negative TV ads.
These ads attacked everything but the real issues facing working families. Sixty-second spots do little to explain the issues, but they do a pretty good job of turning the truth upside down. And I suspect they are also effective at turning off many voters from participating in the political process.
We cannot backpedal or compromise on the issues we care about: making quality, affordable health care a right, not a privilege; protecting Social Security from privatization; keeping good-paying jobs in America; expanding workers’ rights to organize, and promoting fair trade policies.
We no longer have a balance of power in our federal government; we have an imbalance of power. It’s not only time for the labor movement to reflect on what went wrong, but more important, it’s time for us to rebuild. We have to turn our disappointment into determination. This is not a time for us to retreat to the sidelines, we need to be on the playing field.
