While it may go without saying, there’s probably no President in American history more reviled by worker advocates than Ronald Reagan.
So in what can only be seen as a gross insult to the American labor movement and workers who have fought — and often died — to protect the rights and lives of working people in this country, Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta today named Reagan to the U.S. Department of Labor Hall of Honor.
This can only be seen as a gross insult to the American labor movement and workers who have fought — and often died — to protect the rights and lives of working people in this country
That would be the same Hall of Honor that honors Senator Ted Kennedy, the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers (“I am a Man”), Cesar Chavez, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Frances Perkins and many others who were actual champions of workers.
A week after his arrival, Auchter was shocked to find that the cover of an OSHA publication on Cotton Dust displayed a photograph by Earl Dotter of a cotton dust victim, Louis Harrell. Auchter, believing the cover to be inflammatory, ordered the remaining publications destroyed and reissued the document with no photo on the cover.
Is this Trump getting back at the AFL-CIO’s Rich Trumka and Thea Lee for resigning from his Manufacturing Council? Who knows? It’s a mystery.
So what’s next? What could be crazier? The President announcing that Nazis and White Power terrorists are very fine people?
Nah!
More administration alternate really.
Sad!
This belittles all those who truly deserve this honor. wow.
Why did you not mention that this sonofabitch informed on his own members to the House UnAmerican Activities Commission when he was President of SAG? Fuck Reagan.
How gross! All unions should protest!
Maybe DOL should adopt the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s voting process.
Have a media representative from each OSHA area office convene on the day before the Super Bowl, go through painstaking argument and debate behind closed doors, until 75 or 80% of voters approve the finalists for induction. The whole country could then have spirited debates about who merits induction — Dr. Michaels, yourself, Reagan, Trumka, Elaine Chao, Hilda Solis, Ed Foulke, Cain and Abel (the bloggers, not the biblical figures), and others.
Then televise the induction ceremony all on ESPN2, with the inductees wearing garish blazers and making too-long speeches. Think of the ratings, J.B., think of the ratings!!
I talked with the current president of PATCO re the Reagan installation at the Hall of Honor (Yes, it still exists, as part of of OPEIU). At least his caustic comments were printable in a family newspaper. DOL didn’t return a call asking for their comments on PATCO or on Reagan’s red-baiting. And SAG-AFTRA declined to comment. Ironically, Acosta’s announcement came on the day the current SAG-AFTRA president was re-elected.
If you want to see the story let me know.
Mark Gruenberg
editor’
Press Associates Union News Service
Please.
Pasted in, in response to Mr Tulloh’s request, is the story as we published it in Press Associates Union News Service. MARK GRUENBERG
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Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) — 9/1/2017
PATCO CHIEF: LABOR DEPT. HONOR FOR REAGAN MAKES IT ‘HALL OF SHAME’
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer
WASHINGTON (PAI)—GOP President Donald Trump and his Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta, may think naming Ronald Reagan to the agency’s Labor Hall of Honor is a good idea.
Ron Taylor doesn’t. He says the move will turn the exhibit in DOL’s lobby into a “Hall of Shame.” And he should know.
Taylor, you see, is the president of PATCO – the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, the remnant of the union Reagan decimated with a mass firing when the controllers were forced to strike over safety issues, in 1981.
And Taylor, then youthful and starting his careers, is one of those fired controllers, himself.
“Ronald Reagan is a liar,” Taylor said in a telephone interview with Press Associates Union News Service. “He promised to address the safety issues” the PATCO members raised. But in August 1981, Reagan fired them instead.
Reagan’s Federal Aviation Administration forced the 14,000 controllers to strike over safety. For almost all, their lives were ruined, Taylor says. “It wasn’t just a 2-day gig. We were banned for life,” he adds. Even Democratic President Bill Clinton’s amnesty more than a decade later didn’t help many.
But while Acosta’s announcement angers Taylor, it doesn’t surprise him.
“Anything coming out of the White House with Donald Trump in it is just as bad as Reagan was,” says Taylor, whose current PATCO is a sector of the Office and Professional Employees International Union.
(continued)
Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) – 9/1/2017
(REAGAN, cont. -2)
He also said his former controller colleagues rang up to tell him “this is absurd.”
“I can’t stop it,” Taylor admits about the pro-Reagan DOL ceremony. “But there should be a true message coming out of the DOL. This is a deliberate slap” against unions “by the current administration.”
The key reason, Taylor says, is that “Reagan opened the way for private, and now public, sector workers to be attacked” by companies and now governments – a conclusion virtually all histories of labor and the Reagan era back.
Acosta announced the addition of Reagan to the Hall of Honor during a late-August ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. He gave no date for the induction.
“President Reagan is the only president of the United States to have led a major union. President Reagan’s membership in the Labor Hall of Honor recognizes his accomplishments as a labor leader,” Acosta said.
Acosta cited Reagan’s leadership of the Screen Actors Guild “in its first three strikes” which won “residual payments and health and pension benefits,” among other first-ever gains, for members. Acosta also praised Reagan for supporting the Polish trade union Solidarnosc, whose leadership there eventually contributed – after repression and crackdowns – to collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the end of the Cold War.
But Acosta left a few things out, as did the Sergeants Benevolent Association of New York City, which calls itself an independent union and which sent the nomination to DOL. One was the PATCO strike.
Another was Reagan’s record, also as SAG president, in the red-baiting and destruction of careers of so-called “Communists” and leftist unions during the Joe McCarthy era.
The spokesman for the sergeants promised to contact its president for comment about why his union named Reagan and why it left out PATCO, but the president did not respond.
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