Berry Craig, recording secretary for the Paducah-based Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council and a professor of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, is a former daily newspaper and Associated Press columnist and currently a member of AFT Local 1360. Craig sends us this.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and the GOP are at it again, fishing for union votes with the same old social issues sucker bait.

Retired Plumbers and Pipe Fitters (UA) leader Larry Sanderson of Paducah, Ky., calls it “the three Gs con job,” as in “God, Guns and Gays.”

Says Larry, a union buddy of mine and a former UA international representative for Kentucky and Tennessee:

If I were to send our members a letter saying that we’re going to have a special union meeting next Friday night to cut their scale $5 an hour, they’d show up and raise all kinds of hell.
Romney and the Republicans are trying to eliminate unions altogether. But there are union members who say they won’t vote for Obama because he supports gay marriage or because they believe the Republicans when they say Obama is not a Christian and will come to your house, kick down your door and take away your guns.
The union puts food on our tables. Mitt Romney wants to take food off our tables. It’s as simple as that. And, by the way, Obama is a Christian, and I’ve got more guns now than I had when Obama got elected.

Larry, who was business manager of Paducah-based Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 184 for many years, says it behooves all union members—but especially those inclined to vote on social issues—to take a hard look at candidate Romney's record and the GOP platform.

•  Romney and the Republicans want a national "right to work" for less law, which would enable every worker in America to enjoy union-won wages and benefits without paying dues to support the union.
• Romney and the Republicans want to abolish project labor agreements (PLAs) and the Davis-Bacon Act. Both set pay rates for construction projects, thus making it easier for union contractors to compete with cheaper nonunion contractors. At the same time, Davis-Bacon and PLAs ensure better wages for all construction workers.
• Romney and the Republicans want to return to the era of President George W. Bush who put union-haters in charge at the Labor Department, the National Labor Relations Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Larry and I are old enough to know that the GOP social issues hustle has been around for a long time. The Republicans started pressing these hot buttons to chip away at the union vote when Ronald Reagan ran for the White House in 1980. It’s spelled out in “The Right Wing Attack on the American Labor Movement,” by Joanne Ricca of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. Her solid, well-documented study is online at www.wisaflcio.org.

I saw the scam work first-hand, when I was a newspaper reporter helping cover a 1980 campaign stop by President Jimmy Carter at a coal mine in southern Illinois. The miners belonged to the Mine Workers (UMWA) union.

Carter was union-endorsed. The Reagan record was plainly anti-union (and he became the most anti-union president since Herbert Hoover).

Even so, I spied a few miners, all of them young men, waving Reagan signs. I asked them why they opposed Carter. Their answers dumbfounded me, but I dutifully reported what they said.

“If Carter gets back in, he’ll take away our guns,” one told me.

“Reagan’s going to stop abortion and put prayer back in schools,” said another. (Carter is a devout Southern Baptist who prayed and read the Bible often in the White House.)

A larger group mostly of older miners was nearby, almost all of them with re-elect Carter signs. I asked them why they wanted the president to have a second term.

They looked at me like I was nuts. “The Democrats gave us the Wagner Act and every other law to help unions,” one said. “Reagan and the Republicans want to destroy the unions.”

Romney has picked up the anti-union torch passed from Reagan through the two Bushes, Larry says. "Union members have got good jobs, thanks to our unions. Romney and those ‘three G’ Republicans want to take it all away.”