By Mark Di Ionno
[…]
At the Broad Street headquarters of the Newark Teachers Union, the first wave of street canvassers gathered just before 10 in the morning. Representatives of 34 unions operated out of the teacher’s building, working phones and laptops. Each were wearing their own Baraka colors: red for the health workers union, blue for the teachers, orange for the laborers, light green for the drywall workers, etc.
Thomas Giblin, a state assemblyman and business manager for the operations engineers local, said yesterday’s election mobilization of unions was “the biggest labor commitment I’ve seen.”
He compared it to the election of Vincent Murphy (1941), a member of a plumbers’ local, and Leo Carlin (1953), a Teamster.
“This is our get-out-the-vote operation,” said Charles Wowkanech, president of the New Jersey AFL-CIO, who was at the teachers headquarters yesterday. “We’re using phones, Facebook, Twitter, texting, knocking on doors, whatever we can to make sure our union brothers and sisters get out and vote.”
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