hunterbishop.com

While interviewed over the weekend by freelance reporter Justin Avery for an upcoming Big Island Weekly story he's writing about unions, I was trying to explain how labor still carries considerable weight in Hawaii but that most union members do not vote in "lockstep" with union leaders' endorsements. Then he brought up the example of Paula Helfrich, who had strong union backing for a County Council seat in the First District but was trounced by J Yoshimoto last November. At that point I should have mentioned the obvious example, Gov. Linda Lingle, who's won a couple of times now decidedly with voters despite strong opposition from unions. But unfortunately that thought escaped me at the time. There are other examples, of course, but the point is that union members by and large make up their own minds and vote their interests which may or may not coincide with union endorsements, and union members have not shown a hesitancy to vote the way they want to. Then this morning Ian Lind wrote about some "flagrant anti-union bias" in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin's weekend editions over the state Legislature's recent work. Good work again by Lind, which I recommend to Avery as more good background for his article, and to anyone who mistakenly believes unions wield too much power and influence in Hawaii with a mass of mindless members and a bunch of pawns in the state Legislature.