This is a Crucial Election!

 By Brian D’Arcy, Business Manager, Local 18

We are at a crossroads in our national debate over important domestic issues and the conduct of our foreign affairs. We will choose the future of our country on Tuesday, November 2, when tens of millions of Americans—including huge numbers of union members and families—cast their votes for President and Vice president of the United States, the federal Congress, and members of our state legislature.

This election is the most important that we have ever faced. The differences between President Bush and Democratic Senator John Kerry, are so deep, so important, so fundamentally profound in their effect on us, our jobs and profession, our families, and our futures, that it would be disastrous if union members and families did not vote for pro-union, pro-working people and families candidates.

President Bush and his pro-corporate America cronies are beholden to the rich and no one else. Their policies and agenda favor them over the needs and goals of working people and families. They do not care about working people and our needs. They do not care about our jobs, pensions, medical insurance and retirement security.

Money and power talk, everyone else walks. If you are in top management, the Bush administration is your friend. If you actually work for a living, it is out to crush you.

 If you are tired of that attitude, tired of having to fight for things that are fundamental rights and should not be “doled out” to us by the wealthy and powerful at their whim, then there is no choice: we must vote for Democratic Senator John Kerry on Election Day, November 2.

The Differences are Enormous

Anywhere you look, considering any important issue, the differences between President Bush and John Kerry are profound—and profoundly important for all working people and families.

Union Rights

Kerry supports:

• Legislation to allow workers to freely choose to join a union.
• Collective-bargaining rights for Homeland Security Department employees.
• Extending union rights to public-safety personnel in states that do not allow them.

Bush opposes the right of workers to choose a union. He wants to privatize 850,000 federal jobs and deny collective-bargaining rights to hundreds of thousands of federal employees. He is trying to destroy overtime wages and cripple the process through which workers vote for a union.

Well-paying Jobs

Kerry supports:

• Creating 10 million new, well-paying jobs, including ones in mass transit and energy supply.
• Workers’ overtime pay provisions, and opposes corporations’ efforts to take them away.
• Reforming the federal unemployment insurance program to cover more workers with better benefits.

Bush’s terrible tax cuts and economic policies have cost us 1.8 million private-sector jobs and 2.7 million manufacturing jobs between January, 2001 and June, 2004. Under his “leadership,” worker wages have stagnated while corporate profits have soared. His Congress refused to extend unemployment insurance for over two million workers whose benefits had run out.

Health Care

Kerry supports:

• Providing every child in the U.S. with guaranteed health care.
• Extending affordable health care to 95% of all Americans.
• A strong patients’ “Bill of Rights” for dealing with health-care providers.

Bush wants a 30% cut in funds for children’s hospitals. He opposes a patients’ “Bill of Rights”. His policies are making health care and insurance too expensive for many working families. Some 44 million Americans have no coverage—up four million since he took office. Family health insurance costs have soared since 2001.

Exporting Jobs 

Kerry supports:

• Keeping good-paying jobs in the U.S.
• Cracking down on companies that export their jobs overseas by denying them government contracts.

Bush supports huge tax breaks for companies that lay off American workers and export their jobs.

Spending Priorities

Kerry supports:

• Tax breaks for working people and families, not the wealthy.
• Expanding federal health-care and affordable-housing programs.
• Slashing the federal deficit in half within four years.
• Rebuilding schools, inner cities and our infrastructure.

Bush’s tax policies are solely for the rich, at everyone else’s expense. He wants to cut spending for education, nutritional programs for families and children, job training, home ownership, medical research, and mass transit and infrastructure.

Retirement Security

Kerry supports:

• Protecting workers’ pension by strengthening and enforcing rules to guard pension funds from corporate raiders.
• Strengthening Social Security and barring any attempt to privatize the system.

Bush wants to repeal workers’ pension-fund safeguards. He wants to privatize Social Security.

Education

Kerry supports:

• Full funding for the No Child Left Behind Act.
• Modernization and repair of schools.
• Making college affordable for all students with a new College Opportunity Tax Credit.

Bush has slashed federal education spending and gutted his own No Child Left Behind Act. He opposes federal spending to repair and upgrade crumbling schools. He cut $100 million from loan programs that help students pay for college, and he wants to cut Head Start education for thousands of children.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.

Please vote for the agenda that working people want and need and deserve. Vote for the labor choice and future for our children, families and country. Vote for Democrat John Kerry for President on Tuesday, November 2. It really is that important!

Local 18 Members and Families Must Vote YES on Proposition 72!

You may recall that in the November 2003 Surge, we strongly supported the three unions that were on strike over adequate, affordable medical-health coverage. We noted that they were “striking for a profoundly important reason.”

We knew they were right about this issue. We knew that decent health coverage is a basic right, not a privilege to be “generously” granted by an employer or even the government. Good health care, in a plan that people can afford, is nothing less than a matter of life and death.

Yet, in the richest country in the world, home to the most powerful economy ever, more than 43 million Americans (including six million Californians!) are without any medical insurance, and millions more have only bare-bones minimal coverage. Something is very wrong when a nation like ours cannot—or will not—provide basic health coverage to some 15% of its population.

IBEW Local 18 members and families are among the very fortunate people who have adequate, affordable medical-health coverage. But we cannot turn our backs on other working men and women who, through no fault of their own, lack the essential insurance we have.

 There are hundreds of thousands of California employees—maybe even millions—who do their work well, but are threatened with the loss of their hard-earned medical benefits. This is because big corporate interests like Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Macy’s and Target (just to name a few!) want to increase their already-fat profit line by either gutting their workers’ medical-health coverage, or forcing them to pay outrageous monthly fees for it. This is wrong!

Proposition 72, on the Tuesday, November 2 ballot, will keep private health insurance within the reach of working people and families. It will require large companies and medium-sized businesses to pay for their employees’ health insurance. It will ensure that employees receive major medical coverage, preventative care and prescription drugs at an affordable price—just like their bosses and their families enjoy!

 PLEASE VOTE YES ON PROPOSITION 72!

In unity,

BRIAN D’ARCY, Business Manager