Jeff Wiggins, president of Steelworkers Local 9447 in Calvert City

     Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan remind Jeff Wiggins of the old story about the fox guarding the hen house.

     “Elect them, and pretty soon you’ll be eating feathers instead of chicken,” warned Wiggins, president of Steelworkers Local 9447 in Calvert City, Ky.

     The Kentuckian also likens the Romney-Ryan team to a pair of mangy, egg-sucking dogs. “You don’t want them in the hen house either. You want watchdogs."

     Wiggins wants President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden watching over his chicken coop.

     Bill Londrigan, president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO, agrees with Wiggins. “Union members need to study the issues and the candidates and learn which ones really are on our side and which ones aren’t.

     “Who are the ones standing with the big corporations and the one percent, and who are the ones out to destroy organized labor? It's Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan."

     Romney and Ryan are two of the most anti-labor politicians around. But they think they can peel off some union votes with the old social issues sucker bait.

    "The four Gs," said Kip Phillips, USW vice president at large and assistant to USW President Leo Gerard. Phillips, who lives near Benton, Ky., means God, guns, gays and government.

     Said Londrigan: "The social issues are just rhetoric and propaganda they use to divert our attention from the critical economic issues that affect our jobs and our families. They are the real union issues."

     Added Wiggins:

     “When the Republicans trot out the social issues, they're putting the fox in charge of the hen house and letting in that old egg-sucking mutt.

     "Romney and Ryan want to go back to the policies of the Bush administration. They want to deregulate Wall Street and business, policies which wrecked our economy.

    "Their policies are the policies of greed. They want to wipe out unions with a national right to work for less law. They want to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher system. These are the issues we need to be focusing on when we vote.”