by Berry Craig

MAYFIELD, Ky. – Sen. John McCain and the National Rifle Association seem to be a perfect fit.

McCain is the NRA-endorsed candidate for president. He supported a national right to work law, which the fiercely anti-union National Right to Work Committee has wanted for years.

The NRA is cozy with the NRTWC, which also pushes hard for state right to work laws.

The NRA claims it is pro-gun rights, not anti-union. Yet the NRA and NRTWC often back the same candidates. Almost always, those candidates are anti-union like McCain.

A lot of union members are hunters who own guns, especially in rural states like Kentucky. For years, conservative, anti-labor politicians – often aided by the NRA -- have used gun control as a wedge issue to split the union vote and “…to divert workers from voting according to their economic interests and that of their families," wrote Joanne Ricca of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.

Unions endorse candidates “based on economic interests of their members,” Ricca explained. "The Right sees [gun control] as a particularly clever way to prevent workers from following the candidate endorsements of their union.”

Ricca authored "Politics in America: The Right Wing Attack on the American Labor Movement." The article, documented with many footnotes, appeared on the Dairy State labor federation's website, www.wisaflcio.org/political_action/rightwing.

Many gun-owning union members shun the NRA as a shill group for union-busting politicians, most of whom are Republicans. “I refer to the NRA as the ‘National Republican Association,’” said Bill Londrigan, Kentucky State AFL-CIO president.

The name mostly fits. While the NRA sometimes endorses Democrats -- nearly all of them less-than-labor-friendly “Blue Dog” conservatives from Southern right-to-work states – most politicians the NRA gets behind are anti-union Republicans.

McCain’s a good example. He votes the union way only 16 percent of the time, according to the national AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. (Barack Obama’s COPE score is 98 percent pro-union.)

The NRA is glad to help anti-labor politicians like McCain try to convince union members to vote on guns instead of union issues. “Guns are a secondary issue to the workers of this country,” Londrigan added. “If [gun owners]…don’t have a decent job, they won’t be able to afford bullets for their guns.”

Other labor leaders are on to the NRA, too. "We know that the NRA is communicating to our members what clearly are anti-union positions and urging them to support anti-union candidates," The Washington Post quoted Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters.

The Kentucky State AFL-CIO and the IAFF are part of the national AFL-CIO, which is on the NRA’s enemies list as an organization “with anti-gun policies.” The list, which also includes individuals and businesses, is on the Internet at http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=15.

If you want to offer your name for the NRA’s blacklist, key in http://www.nrablacklist.com/. It’s a website sponsored by stoptheNRA.com. I turned in my name when stoptheNRA started four years ago. Just in case it has become lost in cyberspace, I resubmitted my name the other day.

Ricca named names of NRA top guns who are openly anti-union. She quoted Neal Knox, former NRA vice president. He bragged that the gun issue "is the one thing that will spin the blue-collar union member away from his union." Ricca also wrote that before Grover Norquist joined the NRA board, he led anti-union "paycheck protection" ballot initiatives in a number of states.

Norquist is chummy with President George W. Bush, whom unions consider one of the most anti-labor presidents in history. Chuck Cunningham is another NRA union-buster and Bush backer. He led the NRA’s national get-out-the-vote campaign for Bush in 2000, according to Ricca. "Cunningham was executive director of the anti-union New England Citizens for Right-to-Work," she added.

In addition, Ricca said that while he was NRA president, movie star Charlton Heston helped the NRTWC lobby Congress to defeat a measure to prevent employers from breaking strikes by hiring permanent replacement workers.

Though Heston was president of the Screen Actors Guild, he produced a video for the NRWTC, which praised him as “their ‘world famous ally,’” Ricca added. In 1996, Heston, a liberal pro-union Democrat turned ultra-conservative, anti-union Republican, helped the committee’s failed campaign to convince Congress to pass a national right to work bill, she also wrote.

Meanwhile, in denying Schaitberger’s charge, the NRA’s Chris W. Cox said the gun group is not against unions. “As for supporting anti-union candidates, that is purely the result of political reality,” he said on the NRA’s Internet website.

Metaphorically-speaking, Cox failed to practice what the NRA preaches about gun safety with his next sentence. He shot himself in the foot.

“The truth is,” he wrote, “that the vast majority of union political support goes to candidates who actively work against our freedoms” (Italics mine).

So on the one hand, Cox insists that the NRA is not anti-union. On the other, he says unions are in league with freedom-menacing politicians.

The NRA believes “our freedoms” include the right of civilians to pack all the heat they want, including pistols more powerful than sidearms cops carry and machine guns made for mowing down enemy soldiers in war, not for hunting deer in a Kentucky woods. But I wouldn’t bet the farm that NRA “freedoms” include the freedom to have a union. Almost all candidates the NRA supports – from McCain down – put unions on their lists of enemies, too.