Tag: afl cio
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Prominent U.S. Labor Leader, Dies

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Prominent U.S. Labor Leader, Dies

By David Shepardson and Makini Brice

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, head of the largest U.S. labor organization and a key figure in Democratic politics who voiced concern about corporate power and a growing income gap between rich and poor, has died at age 72, the group said on Thursday.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat, told reporters at the White House that Trumka was a "great close personal friend" and said the labor leader had been on a camping trip with his grandsons before he died. A source told Reuters that Trumka died of a heart attack.

Trumka, a third-generation coal miner from Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, began working in the mines at age 19, and became president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 56 unions representing 12.5 million workers, in 2009.

Trumka told Reuters in a 2019 interview that workers wanted to take power back from companies that had too much power.

"Corporations now have more rights than people. Not equal rights, more rights," Trumka said.

"Over the last 20 years, the top one percent has accumulated $21 trillion in wealth and the bottom 50 percent has lost $900 billion in wealth. The inequality gap grows and grows. That's putting us on a trajectory for an implosion of the system," Trumka added.

Trumka presided over the AFL-CIO at a time of increasing challenges for the American labor movement and declining membership. Trumka had pushed U.S. lawmakers to revise trade deals and make it easier for unions to organize new members but organized labor has endured a series of setbacks in trying to organize workers at companies including Amazon.com and Volkswagen AG.

In 2020, 10.8 percent of U.S. workers were in unions, up by 0.5 percent from the prior year, but still down about half from 1983 when 20.1 percent of U.S. workers were unionized.

Democratic politicians remembered Trumka with praise.

"Working people of America have lost a fierce warrior at a time when we needed him most," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. "We have just lost a giant."

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Trumka "fought with principle and persistence to defend the dignity of every person - whether speaking out against apartheid and discrimination abroad or fighting bigotry and racism here at home."

The AFL-CIO, in confirming Trumka's death, said it mourned "the passing of our fearless leader and commit to honoring his legacy with action. ... We will pour everything we have into building an economy, society and democracy that lift up every working family and community."

Trumka worked as a coal miner for more than seven years, supporting himself while attending Penn State University as an undergraduate and through Villanova University, where he received a law degree in 1974. He served as president of the United Mine Workers of America before heading the AFL-CIO.

He also served on Democratic former President Barack Obama's advisory Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

"For nearly 40 years, Rich's leadership has re-galvanized and redefined the modern American labor movement," U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. "... "Because of Rich, workers are rising in America."

(Reporting by David Shephardson, Makini Brice, Jeff Mason, and David Lawder; Writing by Susan Heavey; Editing by Will Dunham)

How Labor Secretary Scalia Failed America’s Endangered Workers

How Labor Secretary Scalia Failed America’s Endangered Workers

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute

Thousands of workers across America begged the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to investigate when their employers failed to take steps to protect them from COVID-19. They reported a lack of face masks, gloves, soap and hand sanitizer. They warned of having to share desks and stand right next to one another on production lines, despite the need for social distancing to slow the spread of the disease. They put their faith in OSHA and waited for the agency to come to their aid.

But help never came.

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Elizabeth Warren Throws Down The Gauntlet To Donald Trump

Elizabeth Warren Throws Down The Gauntlet To Donald Trump

By Lisa Lambert

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Democrats’ liberal firebrand, Senator Elizabeth Warren, threw down the gauntlet to President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday, telling labor union members there are financial and social issues where her party will fight him and continuing to blast the Republican.

Battling bigotry is the first job for Democrats after the election, said Warren, of Massachusetts, giving a sense of how her party will operate now that it no longer controls the White House and remains the minority in both chambers of Congress.

“We will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled Americans – on anyone,” said Warren, who sparred frequently over Twitter with Trump and criticized him on the campaign trail in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s election. “Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever.”

She said Trump had “encouraged a toxic stew of hatred and fear” and during the campaign “regularly made statements that undermined core values of our democracy.”

In the speech to the AFL-CIO labor federation, Warren also said Democrats will resist attempts to loosen financial regulation, “gut” the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

“If Trump and the Republican Party try to turn loose the big banks and financial institutions so they can once again gamble with our economy and bring it all crashing down, then we will fight them every step of the way,” she said.

Warren did highlight areas of agreement. She said “count me in” on Trump’s support of a new Glass-Steagall law to separate investment and retail banking, reforming trade deals, maintaining Social Security benefits, helping on childcare and college costs and rebuilding infrastructure.

Warren rose to lead the liberal wing of the party during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. After Republicans blocked President Barack Obama’s attempt to appoint her as the first director of the CFPB, she won a seat in Congress.

In 2015, progressive groups and a political action committee pressed her to run for president. Since Trump’s victory on Tuesday, many have already renewed their calls, for the 2020 presidential election.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)

IMAGE: U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) takes part in the Washington Ideas Forum in Washington, U.S., October 1, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

His Respected Friend: But What Does Bernie Really Think Of Hillary?

His Respected Friend: But What Does Bernie Really Think Of Hillary?

What does Bernie Sanders really think of Hillary Clinton?

When they meet in debate, the Senator from Vermont usually refers to the former Secretary of State as his “friend” – not in the polite Congressional-speech sense of someone that he actually despises, but in what is presumably his authentic, Brooklyn-born candor. He speaks frequently of his “great respect” for Clinton. And he has said more than once that “on her worst day” she would be a far better president than any of the potential Republican candidates “on their best day.”

Even more often, however, Sanders suggests that Clinton has sold out to the financial industry for campaign contributions, or for donations to her SuperPAC, or perhaps for those big speaking fees she has pocketed since leaving the State Department. Certainly he has fostered that impression among his supporters, who excoriate Clinton in the most uninhibited and sometimes obscene terms on social media.

But if Sanders believes that Hillary Clinton is “bought by Wall Street” — as his legions so shrilly insist — then how can he say, “in all sincerity,” that she is his respected friend?

To date, his criticism of Clinton on this point is inferential, not specific. He hasn’t identified any particular vote or action that proves her alleged subservience to the financial titans she once represented as the junior senator from New York. As Sanders knows, Clinton’s actual record on such issues as the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ran opposite to the banksters.

Back in 2007, eight years before she could ever imagine facing the socialist senator in debate, she spoke up against the special “carried interest” tax breaks enjoyed by hedge-fund managers. Her proposals to regulate banks more strictly have won praise not only from New York Times columnist and Nobel economist Paul Krugman, but from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the populist Pasionaria, as well.

Still, to Sanders the mere act of accepting money from the financial industry, or any corporate interest, is a marker of compromise or worse. Why do the banks spend millions on lobbying, he thunders, unless they get something in return? The answer is that they want access – and often donate even to politicians who don’t fulfill all their wishes. They invariably donate to anyone they believe will win.

Meanwhile, Sanders doesn’t apply his stringent integrity test to contributions from unions, a category of donation he accepts despite labor’s pursuit of special-interest legislation– and despite the troubling fact that the leadership of the labor movement filed an amicus brief on behalf of Citizens United, which expanded their freedom to offer big donations to politicians. (That case was rooted, not incidentally, in yet another effort by right-wing billionaires to destroy Hillary Clinton.)

By his own standard, Sanders shouldn’t take union money because the AFL-CIO opposed campaign finance reform, which he vociferously supports. Or maybe we shouldn’t believe that he truly supports campaign finance reform, because he has accepted so much money from unions.

Such assumptions would be wholly ridiculous, of course – just as ridiculous as assuming that Clinton’s acceptance of money from banking or labor interests, both of which have made substantial donations to her campaign, proves her advocacy of reform is insincere.

Political history is more complex than campaign melodrama. If critics arraign Clinton for the decision by her husband’s administration to kill regulation of derivatives trading, it is worth recalling that she was responsible for the appointment of the only official who opposed that fateful mistake. She had nothing to do with deregulation — but as First Lady, she strongly advocated on behalf of Brooksley Born, a close friend of hers named by her husband to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. One of the few heroes of the financial crisis, Born presciently warned about the dangers of unregulated derivatives.

So it is fine to criticize Clinton’s big speaking fees from banks and other special interests, which create a troubling appearance that she should have anticipated. It is fine to complain that politicians are too dependent on big-money donors. And it is fine to push her hard on the issues that define the Sanders campaign, which has done a great service by highlighting the political and economic domination of the billionaire elite.

But it is wrong to accuse Clinton of “pay for play” when the available evidence doesn’t support that accusation. And if Sanders wants to hold her to a standard of absolute purity, he should apply that same measure to himself.