Labor & Employment Law

Working Families Getting out the Vote in Massachusetts Special Election

By Mike Hall

Today, Massachusetts working families are going to the polls to help put Martha Coakley in the U.S. Senate in a special election.

The election day get-out-the-vote drive follows a long Martin Luther King Jr.  weekend that saw thousands of union members working at phone banks in local union halls, knocking on doors of other union members and talking with their co-workers at jobs sites across the Bay State.

Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Robert Hayes says Coakley will continue the legacy of Ted Kennedy in fighting for working families.

This election is all about working families. That’s who the late Senator Kennedy spent his life fighting for.

As Massachusetts attorney general, Coakley has a long record of supporting working families. She vigilantly enforced prevailing wage, overtime, employee misclassification, independent contractor and workplace discrimination laws.

In the state legislature, Brown turned his back on working families when he voted to cut unemployment benefits for people who needed them the most.

Coakley promises that in the Senate she will be a strong advocate for job creation and the Employee Free Choice Act. Her opponent, Scott Brown, strongly opposes the Employee Free Choice Act and has vowed to be the 41st vote for the Republican agenda. With 41 votes, a minority of Senate Republicans will be able to block every piece of legislation vital to working families

In economic policy, Brown is a Bush-Cheney clone. Not only does he believe the answer to the economic crisis is more tax cuts for the wealthy; he opposes a proposed fee on Wall Street firms that received taxpayer bailouts and then gave extravagant bonuses to executives.

Says Coakley.

Scott Brown is standing with Wall Street CEOs. As attorney general, I’ve stood up to Wall Street and recovered millions of dollars back for taxpayers

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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 19, 2010 (boomark / email).