Rich Trumka’s legacy must resonate
This Labor Day, with both voting rights and democracy under siege across the country, the legacy the late AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka left behind has never been more important. At the core of Trumka’s 12-year reign atop the leading federation of unions was his belief that, in order for unions to have a future, labor leaders and workers need to be engaged in electoral politics.
I first saw Trumka in 1985 in Williamson, W.Va., when the United Mine Workers (UMW) were engaged in a bitter, 15-month strike with the A.T. Massey Coal Company. I was reporting on the strike, and I was caught by surprise at the sight of Trumka in a three-piece suit, standing ankle-deep in mud, talking with a group of miners about how long he expected the strike to last.
But none of his listeners was surprised by Trumka’s appearance or his focus on the difficulties ahead. He had won the presidency of the UMW in 1982 at the age of 33 by a margin of more than two to one. The men who had voted so overwhelmingly for him saw Trumka as one of them. They liked that he came from a family of miners, and they liked that he had not stayed in the mines but gone to Penn State, then gotten a law degree from Villanova.
Trumka never forgot that he came to power in the UMW because of the path others had taken. Through the 1960s, the union was run as an autocracy, a holdover from John L. Lewis’s presidency of more than 40 years. In 1969, UMW president W. A. “Tony” Boyle had ordered the murder of the man who defeated him as president, Joseph “Jock” Jablonski. The crime would land Boyle in jail with a life sentence and in 1970 pave the way for the Miners for Democracy movement that a decade later would help bring Trumka to power in a campaign to modernize the union.
During his presidency of the UMW, Trumka led the union to victories in strikes, but he also showed his willingness to forge broad alliances. When the National Union of Mineworkers in South Africa called for a boycott against Royal Dutch Shell, Trumka got the UMW to join the boycott and helped persuade the AFL-CIO to do likewise.
Those kinds of alliances took on even greater life when he moved on to the AFLCIO. In 2008 as secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, Trumka made headlines at a United Steelworkers convention when he took on the racial opposition to Obama’s presidential candidacy. In a speech that went viral on YouTube, Trumka declared, “We can’t tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of white folks out there who just can’t get around the idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a Black man.”
A year later as the new president of the AFL-CIO, Trumka made the same point in even broader terms. He had helped Obama gain the White House with union votes in such key swing states as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, and his power was on the rise.
“We have a moral responsibility to take the benefits of union representation to those who the labor movement walked past in the past. That means organizing poverty-wage African-American, Latino and Asian workers,” Trumka insisted in the first speech he delivered as president of the AFL-CIO.
Trumka would not waver from this idea during the years that followed. His response to the death of George Floyd was to support the Black Lives Matter movement and declare, “We are all connected, so let us speak the names of the lost.”
The key legislation for Trumka during the time he headed the AFL-CIO was the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which passed the House by 225-206 vote in 2020 but was never taken up by the Republican-controlled Senate. The PRO Act has the potential to be the most pro-union legislation since the 1935 National Labor Relations Act opened the door for unions to organize. It forbids company-sponsored anti-union meetings that require mandatory worker attendance, requires arbitration if a company refuses to negotiate a first contract after a union wins an election, and establishes financial penalties when companies violate worker rights.
With union membership down to less than 11% of the workforce from its high of 34.8% in 1954, the battles Trumka took on to change the country’s political landscape were always hard ones. But with the union workforce becoming more racially diverse and opening itself up to such knowledge workers as computer operators and adjunct professors, Trumka’s legacy with its bedrock of inclusiveness has grown in appeal.
The Trumka I met for the first time in the coal fields of West Virginia was, it turned out, a model for the union leader who finished his career as president of the AFL-CIO. And he remains a guide for where organized labor must go, and grow, in America.