Hearty welcome to IBEW Local 692

With this Labor Day edition, members of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 692 in Bay City will once again be receiving The Building Tradesman.

It has been well over a decade since our paper has appeared in the mailboxes of Local 692 members. Welcome back!

In the way of an introduction, the Tradesman has been publishing since 1952 and is the official publication of the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council. We serve more than 50 local building trades unions and mail about 43,000 copies each edition, which go out every other week.

Recall of GOP effort falls short in Wisconsin

MILWAUKEE (PAI) – The labor-pushed drive to recall six Wisconsin GOP state senators whose votes pushed Radical Right GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s abolition of collective bargaining through the state legislature fell one senate seat short.

With the GOP holding a 19-14 lead in the senate, labor-backed Democrats needed to win three of the six races – five of them in leaning-Republican or strongly Republican districts – to wrest control of the Wisconsin Senate. Dems won two seats in recall elections this month.

The recalls were triggered when the 19 Republicans pushed Walker’s legislation through the state senate earlier this year, defying protests which brought up to 100,000 people onto the state capitol lawn in Madison.

Walker’s law killed collective bargaining for 200,000 state and local government workers. It’s the vanguard of an avalanche of Radical Right-GOP-big business laws nationwide in both the states and Congress, aimed at destroying unions, cutting wages and pensions, eliminating collective bargaining and trashing the middle class.