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TBOU's Anti-Union Hopeful

To the Editor:

The issues I'm bringing up have to do with TWU Local 100's elections, and this will be printed after the ballots are in. It will have no impact on the election for that reason, but I think these issues are so important that they still need to be brought up.

I went to one of Israel Rivera Jr.'s Web sites, TWUBus.com, recently and I saw two things that disturbed me. He is the candidate for secretarytreasurer of TWU Local 100 on the Take Back Our Union (TBOU) slate.

One of the items reads "Union Violence Harassment and Intimidation of Workers." I clicked it and what comes up is this right-wing, anti-union, anti- Employee Free Choice Act garbage. The other item is one in which he called Roger Toussaint a derogatory, racist, anti-Carribean word [Editor's note: the reference is to Mr. Rivera saying that when he tried to sell the domain name www.rogertoussaint.com, he discovered that it was "not even worth a damn coconut."]

Rivera was not TBOU's first choice for secretary-treasurer. That was David Francis, who was disqualified for not being in good standing continuously for an entire year. Another Top Four leadership spot was originally for Marvin Holland, who dropped out for the same reason. This is the sorry pool of potential candidates TBOU swam in. Don't they check these people out?

It seems that the only thing that unites the TBOU slate is a hatred of Roger Toussaint and Ed Watt—a bit of an irrational hatred, in my opinion.

Are racism and anti-unionism the ideals John Samuelsen, Steve Downs and the rest of TBOU want for TWU Local 100? I think a person with such views shouldn't be a shop steward, never mind secretary-treasurer. To me, it's a disgrace that TBOU has put forward a person with such views for secretary-treasurer of the union Mike Quill and his comrades founded 75 years ago.
JOHN McCARTHY
Track Division Vice Chair
TWU Local 100

Editor's note: Mr. McCarthy is running for re-election on the United Invincible slate.