2025 Year In Review

What a year! My blog is growing like a weed among CTA workers as it becomes the most reliable source for ATU-related information. 

Below are some statistics and top-ten articles to close out another year of survival for those of us still living—and to ring in the new year of 2026. 

If you are wondering about this picture, it is a meme submitted by a creative coworker who wants to see me and Brother Martin Gallardo stay in office.

It's a humorous corruption of a very popular Mexican band that performs corridos (beautiful and sometimes tragic narratives of history, life and romance). 

The band is known as Los Famosos Del Bravo. Check them out and comment below.

Hopefully, I will win president and Brother Martin will maintain his Executive Board spot or run for Vice President in November of 2026 (I will need to resign my spot in order to run for president). 

I never planned on running for president, but these past two years have been hell with our own presidents trying to remove me from office, help mismanagers punish me and coworkers and more. I might as well not have been elected because I am being stopped from doing my sworn duties. 

Anyway, Brother Martin and I may not play guitars and sing, but we are performing revolutionary work by un-apologetically defending our coworkers from CTA mismanagement!

If any of are familiar with him, you know he is a fighter as well as me. We are certainly unloved by the mismangers and trusted by many of the rank-and-file CTA workers. 

Total views for my blog in 2025: 31,100 (All time since 2021 it is 98,800).

Top Ten articles for 2025: 

1. Fall 2025 Shop Worker Pick
2. Spring 2025 Shop Worker Pick
3. CTA Mismanagement Coming After Me
4. Layoffs? Let's Talk About It
5. Got Written Up? Here's What To Do
6. Almost $1 Million Unaccounted For at Local 308
7. Charges on a Perverted President
8. Vote YES for These Grievances on June 10
9. How To Solve Smoking on CTA Trains
10. CTA Mismanagement Wants My Email and Text Messages 

As you see, the hottest ones are the Pick. Now this is just the Picks for Rail Car Servicers, Repairers and Motor Blowers. Next in line are about job security, financial malfeasance and how the CTA mismanagemnet is trying so hard to punish me for defending the members. 

Some of the best articles on the blog are not authored by me. I keep an open-door for all contributors—even critics are welcome (but none have taken me up on the challenge yet). Guest Blogger contributions by Brother Chris Campisi, retiree Bill Davis, Eric Struch and others have graced the blog front page (some use pseudonyms).  

If I win president, every department will have this kind of information on my blog. As you see, it's easy for me and I have the skills needed to pull it off right. 

Unfortunately, no other official is making information so freely available—nor helping members submit grievances about Pick violations. 

Simply put, when we inform members with everything, they can decide their own destiny! That is my Definite Chief Aim: Help Local 308 Members take control of Local 308. If you haven't register for my Virtual Union Hall yet, what are you waiting for? If I win, you will have immediate access to control your union. 

Where there any articles you think should have been on the Top Ten? Comment below.