Trumka led the AFL-CIO to more aggressive thinking
Richard Trumka, the powerful president of the AFL-CIO who rose from the coal mines of Pennsylvania to preside over one of the largest labor organizations in the world, died Thursday. He was 72.
The federation confirmed Trumka’s death in a statement. He had been AFL-CIO president since 2009, after serving as the organization’s secretary-treasurer for 14 years. From his perch, he oversaw a federation with more than 12.5 million members and ushered in a more aggressive style of leadership.
Further details of Trumka’s death, including the cause and where he died, were not immediately available.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Trumka’s death from the Senate floor. “The working people of America have lost a fierce warrior at a time when we needed him most,” he said.
Trumka was the son and grandson of coal miners. He was born in 1949 in the small southwest Pennsylvania town of Nemacolin and worked for seven years in the mines before earning an accounting degree from Penn State and then a law degree from Villanova University.
He rose in a distinctly different era, as union membership declined and labor’s political power dwindled. He often focused on making the case for unions to the white working class who have turned away from Democrats.
He met with then-President Donald Trump but also forcefully criticized him, calling Trump a “fraud” who had deceived the working class.
Trump shot back, criticizing Trumka as ineffectual. “No wonder unions are losing so much,” Trump tweeted. At times, Trumka challenged blue-collar workers to confront their own prejudices, including a forceful denunciation of racism in the union ranks during Barack Obama’s first winning campaign for the White House.
“We can’t tap dance around the fact that there’s a lot of white folks out there ... and a lot of them are good union people, they just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a Black man,” he said during an impassioned 2008 speech. There’s “only one really, really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama. And that’s because he’s not white.”
Until his death, he used his power to push for health care legislation, expanded workers rights and infrastructure spending.
Larry Cohen, a longtime labor activist and former president of the Communications Workers of America, said Trumka’s death was a “devastating” loss for labor, in part because of his long-standing relationship with Biden.
“His ability to talk to the president of the United States will be very hard to replace. It’s a long history, based on personal trust. It’s remarkable,” said Cohen, who had known Trumka since the early 1980s.
As AFL-CIO president, he vowed to revive unions’ sagging membership rolls and pledged to make the labor movement appeal to a new generation of workers who perceive unions as “only a grainy, faded picture from another time.”