I don’t get it. Why doesn’t the Republican hierarchy just wear a sign around their neck saying, “We don’t want any working people to vote for us, ever!”? They might as well, because it seems as though they go out of their way to alienate and antagonize every working person possible, certainly every union member.

Take last year’s fight in Wisconsin, for example. The Republican Wisconsin governor said they needed to cut state employee expenses, so the state employees’ union acceded to pretty much everything the governor wanted, but that wasn’t enough. He kept pushing for restrictions on their bargaining rights, at which point it became nothing but union busting, pure and simple. Pretty much the same thing in Ohio last year, as I recall. And then there’s Indiana. All the talk about protecting workers and luring jobs with right-to-work legislation is nothing but thinly veiled union busting, and most every working person knows it.

Funny thing is, surveys have shown that at least half of the working people are pretty conservative and vote Republican, while other surveys of workers have shown that more than 50 percent of them would like to have a union where they work. And don’t forget, no employer has ever been unionized that didn’t deserve it. At the same time, any new workplace being unionized today is truly a miracle considering the hurdles and roadblocks put in their way.

But still, local and national conservative talk show hosts seem to go out of their way to denigrate anything and everything union. Oh, they say they’re just talking about the union leaders and not the workers, but they’re not really fooling anybody. Are there any bad unions or union leaders – of course. Are there any bad politicians?

It can be argued that the rise of the middle class, the very heart and soul of our economy, coincides with the rise of the unionized working class. But over the past three or four decades, the middle class has been decimated by our government’s facilitating the export of millions of good-paying union manufacturing jobs and an all-out assault on unions. The workers, unionized or not, don’t forget, and they vote, but apparently the Republicans don’t want them voting for them. Too bad.

KEN SELKING

Decatur