Tipsheet

The AFL-CIO's Attempt to Show Union Solidarity with Ukraine Fails Spectacularly

Spencer Brown
Spencer Brown  |  March 17, 2022 7:35 AM

The union bosses over at the AFL-CIO may have had their hearts in the right place this week, but their execution of a photo op to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine backfired pretty spectacularly due to a few fundamental issues with their staged picture. 

Around 5:30 Tuesday evening, the largest union federation in America tweeted "From the AFL-CIO Executive Council and our 12.5 million members, #SolidaritywithUkraine" and included a photo of roughly 30 people holding up signs that read "STAND WITH UKRAINE" and feature a dove holding an olive branch over the background of what is supposed to be the Ukrainian flag.

But none of those people, nor whoever designed the signs, noticed that they had the flag upside down. Oops?

As all the virtue signalers who've added the flag to their Twitter bio know, the flag's blue stripe is at the top with yellow below, "symbolism of blue skies over golden wheat fields," according to Encyclopedia Britannica. 

Later on Tuesday, a little after 10:00 pm, another tweet from the AFL-CIO's account was sent, sharing a similar but not identical message: "From the AFL-CIO executive council and 12.5 million members across the country, we #StandWithUkraine #1u." Again an image was attached, but it was just the earlier image after an apparent trip to a photoshop butcher to flip some — but not all — of the flags right-side up. The dove and olive branch, unfortunately, apparently couldn't be saved. Three cheers for solid union work.

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Then on Wednesday morning, around 9:30, the tweet with the "fixed" image was also deleted. All that exceptional union labor was for naught, evidently. 

Also deleted? Tweets from the official American Federation of Teachers account that showed AFT's President Randi Weingarten smiling proudly with an upside down AFL-CIO sign. 

Weingarten subsequently tweeted "The flag is upside down. My bad. So I am deleting the tweet" but that wasn't the only problem. Turns out, she also misspelled "Ukraine" in her tweet.

Perhaps the head of America's second-largest teachers union should sit in on a few world geography and/or spelling classes? You really can't make this stuff up.

Even after the AFL-CIO's repetitious tweet deletions, UAW members were out and about in DC on Wednesday afternoon, protesting Russian aggression and tweeting photos with the upside-down signs.