Ads outrage public workers

By Erin Nicholes of The Montana Standard - 08/26/2006

A Washington, D.C., group’s anti-union advertisements have outraged Butte public employees and labor representatives.

“I was really disturbed by it,” said Kurtis Lean, Butte chapter president of the Montana Public Employees Association and assistant registrar at Montana Tech.

“We’re here to serve people, and we’re also taxpayers.” The Center for Union Facts recently ran full-page ads in the Billings Gazette, the Missoulian, as well as TV ads statewide, villainizing public employees and unions.

Local workers said the ads misrepresent public employees as lazy and unions as manipulative.

“They’re terrible how they make public employees look so stupid,” said Maureen Driscoll, a Butte High School teacher and secretary of the Butte Teachers Union. “I come from a working class family; it’s terribly insulting to me.” The message is aimed at taxpayers, Sarah Longwell, spokeswoman for the Center for Union Facts, said Friday.

“We really want the taxpayers to be more educated about how their money’s being spent,” she said, adding that’s why newspaper ads were taken out in dense population areas.

“The ads aren’t meant to target workers, they’re meant to be a billboard, to be edgy.” This week, The Standard State Bureau quoted a Montana Public Employees Union official accusing the center of being a “front group” for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Heads of the MPEA and the MEA-MFT — the school and government workers union — each said the ad campaign is promotion for a state ballot measure that would cap spending and kill a minimum-wage initiative.

Local people agreed, and said they believe out-of-state interests are driving the campaign.

“I think most of it’s coming out of Washington, D.C.,” said Dan Dolan, an employer advocate with the state Department of Labor in Butte, and vice president for MPEA.

“Almost every Montana citizen knows a state employee. Think of the respect they get for working.” Longwell denied knowing who finances the center and whether any donors are from Montana.

“I don’t know who funds us, and we don’t disclose who funds us one way or the other,” she said.

She also denied a connection between the ads and the ballot initiative.

“The fact that there were ballot initiatives in the state made the state more attractive to us in terms of having a population that was already discussing this issue,” she said.

Expect to continue seeing the ads, at least in the short-term.

They’ll run “pretty much until the money runs out,” she said.