Delegation to Madison

We discussed then promises of the governor elect, Scott Walker, which was in November 2010, before he set foot in the governor office. We are happy to see that those messages took four months to reach John Samuelsen and his TBOU team-we are glad, it is better late than sorry.

The other side of the equation is-who will join John Samuelsen going to Madison; whether those cronies of his in TBOU who will kiss up to him, they will be the first on line to demand those first class airfare, probably with a six star hotel with fine food consumption and expense paid by your hard earned dues. We support the idea that those laid off members are the ones entitled to go with John Samuelsen, not his cronies. No more trips to Portugal at the expense of your hard earned dues.

If we need to show solidarity with the Wisconsin blue collar, we must start with things we control-the first step is, we must boycott all products of Koch Industries; it is clear the Koch family strategy of “It is up to us to combat what is now the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes.” displays that they favor prosperity over the labor rights. Thus, it is important to make sure that there are no business dealings with Koch Industries or their subsidiaries-we must boycott all their products.

It is also clear that the Wisconsin governor may win this round in our labor struggle against the GOP governor with his republican majority in the house and assembly, therefore we must look for alternative strategies to contain this phenomenon, and to weaken the ambition of GOP attacking labor union. We got into this mess based on greed and stupidity of bankers as well as the willingness of legislators to deregulate the financial sector in the first place. There is no plausible case that this economic mess was caused by the blue collar who are facing the brunt of budget cuts and deregulation, and using this sorry economy condition to further GOP political agenda.

The current pensions and wages were negotiated in good faith by unions and public-sector employers, commitments were made and now we the blue collar suddenly find ourselves unfairly blamed for a financial meltdown caused by (unpunished and unaccountable) actors in the private sector.

It is important that we must deal with the root cause (in this case it is Koch Industries), we in TWU Local 100 must do it right. Thus, we shall review all our business transactions to figure out if we ever had any business dealing with Koch Industries, or its subsidiaries and eliminate that. We may go to Madison, Wisconsin to show support to our fellow blue collar-it would be great solidarity to them if we boycott products of the root cause, which is evidently Koch Industries.