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Bernie Sanders Wins Support Of 700,000-Member CWA Union

By Dustin Murrell
Published on: 02:19 PST, Dec 17, 2015

On Wednesday night, Bernie Sanders earned his largest presidential campaign endorsement to date when the Communications Workers of America — one of the largest unions in the United States with more than 700,000 members — indicated that they will throw their support behind the senator from Vermont. Given his recurring democratic-socialist rhetoric, it comes as no surprise that the union is behind Sanders. The official announcement is scheduled for Thursday at 11 a.m.

As reported by U.S. Uncut, Larry Cohen (former president of the CWA) joined the Bernie Sanders campaign this summer to act as the Senator’s labor adviser. The CWA includes members of both the private and public workforce from the United States, Puerto Rico, and Canada. The Union is active in more than 10,000 towns and cities across the U.S. Helping win over the union’s endorsement, Senator Sanders spoke to a group of striking Verizon Wireless employees (affiliated with the CWA) in October.

As noted by MSNBC, despite the almost three-fourths of a million members represented by the CWA, Sanders still trails Hillary Clinton in terms of support from unions. The Democratic front-runner and former First Lady is currently being endorsed by a number of unions that collectively represent more than 12 million workers. The press conference to officially announce the CWA’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders will be from the union’s headquarters in Washington.

As BetterWorld.net highlights, some eloquent things have been said by Bernie Sanders about why unions in the United States are important.

“The benefits of joining a union are clear: higher wages, better benefits and a more secure retirement. If we are serious about reducing income and wealth inequality and rebuilding the middle class, we have got to substantially increase the number of union jobs in this country… There are folks out there who say, ‘it doesn’t impact me, I’m not a union guy, I’m not a teacher, I’m not a civil servant.’ Let me tell you how it does matter to you: Wages are going down in this country for everybody. When you destroy unions there will be no standard at all, nobody left to negotiate decent jobs for the middle class.”

This major endorsement win for Sanders comes off of the heels of the fifth Republican Debate on Tuesday. As he has received far more media coverage than any other candidate, Bernie Sanders talked about Donald Trump recently on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. He also talked with Killer Mike about Trump in a video that recently went viral.

In October, Trump called Bernie Sanders a “communist,” claiming that Sanders wanted to increase tax rates as high as 90 percent. Politifact was unable to find anything to back Trump’s claim. Incidentally, Donald Trump’s tax plan has come under some major scrutiny of its own.

In addition to the 700,000 members of the CWA, MMA megastar Ronda Rousey also supports Bernie Sanders, despite the fact that Donald Trump claimed Rousey liked the real estate mogul when discussing women in the military. Conversely — and perhaps surprisingly — fellow GOP candidate Marco Rubio clarified to CNN that Sanders’ socialist position is different than the communist regime in places like Cuba, the country from which Rubio’s parents fled.

According to the most recent polls, the Washington Times claims that Hillary Clinton still leads Bernie Sanders by 33 points. Some people have questioned the accuracy of those numbers. The Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign hopes the CWA endorsement will help close that gap.

[Image via Twitter]

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