From In These Times: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15600/a_makeover_for_the_labor_movement/
Live from the AFL-CIO convention: Federation President Richard Trumka has a dream.
BY David Moberg
September 12, 2013
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, told the federation’s quadrennial convention in Los Angeles on Monday that he wants the federation of unions to broaden itself into a new movement that includes all working people, not only those in traditional labor unions. And he wants that working-class movement to be the cornerstone of a more closely knit, broadly based progressive movement.
Coming shortly after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Trumka’s effort to inspire leaders of an embattled labor movement invited comparison with Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech. By that measure, it fell short-—and not just of the unrealistically high bar for public rhetoric. More significantly, the declining labor movement has little of the energy of the ascending civil rights movement 50 years ago.
Persistent corporate and political attacks since the 1970s have weakened unions and put them on the defensive; they’ve not yet found a foothold for a counteroffensive. As a result, over the past several decades, the labor movement lost much of its former power to improve all workers’ lives and create a more egalitarian and democratic society. Many non-union workers came to see unionized workers’ advantages not as the standard that they might share, as they did during the 1940s through the 1960s, but as simply union privilege. And rather than improve the pay of non-union workers to match the union standard, employers increasingly demanded union concessions to match non-union—or overseas—standards. Unions thus lost some ability to protect their gains, and the class solidarity inspired by union-spurred improvements to the lives of all workers was fractured.
Since 1980 or so, Trumka said, the world of the American worker has been turned upside down: The richest Americans took all the new national income, and consequently, “The working class is not the middle class any more.”
To reverse the decline, Trumka urged unions to embrace new forms of membership, from organizing workers even when the law or circumstances make it difficult to form traditional unions (such as taxi drivers or domestic workers) to expanding Working America, the decade-old community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
He proposed a new effort to organize traditional unions in the South, the poorest and least unionized region in the country; he also stressed the importance of revised procedures to avoid conflicts among union-organizing campaigns.
“To turn America right-side-up,” he said, “we need a real working-class movement.” That would be a movement of “the 99 percent,” he said, as opposed to the 11 percent now in labor unions, most of whom work under negotiated collective bargaining agreements.
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