AFL-CIO's Rich Trumka Wants Labor For Labor's Sake

By Steve Hynd

It'd be remiss of me not to note AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka's words of warning to the Democratic Party on Friday. The Nation's John Nichols has the best run-down:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is stepping up with a plan for unions to declare �independence� and back candidates � no matter what their party affiliation � who are committed to support workers and their unions.

Trumka, who was in Wisconsin early and has visited most of the states where battles over labor rights and cuts in public services are playing out, has made no secret of his interest in building on the energy of the new state-based movements.

It is with this in mind that he is now talking about changing the way labor practices politics. And that's a very good thing.

�We are looking hard at how we work in the nation�s political arena. We have listened hard, and what workers want is an independent labor movement that builds the power of working people � in the workplace and in political life,�the AFL-CIO president said in a Friday National Press Club address that could turn out to be one of the most important speeches of the 2012 election cycle. �Our role is not to build the power of a political party or a candidate. It is to improve the lives of working families and strengthen our country.�

Trumka is not saying that labor unions will no longer back the Democratic party and Democratic candidates � up to and including President Obama. As in the past, labor will lean toward the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. What Trumka is saying, however, is that labor will not simply back Democrats because they are Democrats.

Indeed, he is putting compromise-prone and all-talk-no-action Democrats on notice.

�We�ll be less inclined to support people in the future that aren�t standing up and actually supporting job creation and the type of things that we�re talking about. It doesn�t matter what party they come from. It will be a measuring stick,� Trumka explained on the eve of the speech.

The Press Club address, a high-profile initiative by the leading figure in the American labor movement, included a warning to Democratic officials who think they can make draconian cuts in education and public services � or that they can undermine union rights � simply by claiming that the Republicans would make crueler cuts.

�It doesn�t matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside � the outcome is the same either way,� said Trumka. �If leaders aren�t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families� interests, working people will not support them. This is where our focus will be � now, in 2012 and beyond.�

As David Dayen writes, we've heard similiar from trade unions before, only for them to run back to the Democrats as soon as the "most important election EVAAAHRRR" schtick begins every election cycle. But David agrees that there are structural changes in the labor movement and the challenges it faces that suggest the unions might mean it this time.

One change from previous years is that labor faces an existential crisis in the states. To the extent that they won�t focus their work on national Democrats, it�s because they�re trying to save themselves in Wisconsin and Ohio and Florida and New Hampshire and across the country. They don�t have much of a choice.

The second thing is that it�s been pretty plain to see that labor got almost nothing for their efforts for national Democrats over the past few years. A progressive member of Congress told me this week that he would understand labor not making the same investment in the Democratic Party, because the return on that investment has been so nonexistent. This candid recognition at the highest levels signals that labor has made their position known. In addition, nobody is better positioned than labor to make the argument that the working class has lost all its traction and faces an assault from inequality, wage stagnation and an economy that only works for the rich. Democrats have abandoned that ideological battle, so labor must pick up the slack.

Of course, if the Democrats at a federal level had actually had working people's backs while they had a majority to eact pro-labor legislation with, the labor movement wouldn't be facing such existential crises at a State level to begin with.

I'd go far further than Trumka. The labor movement and the left in general will never get what it wants by voting for Whigs and it should be inviting non-whiggish Dems to come and join a new deal. If the American Left wishes to save itself by the end of the decade, it must cease to think of itself as a pressure group clamped parastically onto the flank of the centrist-right Democratic party and begin to see itself instead as a nascent political party in its own right - one that is preparing for government.

Still, Trumka obviously recognises, as Kevin Drum recently put it, that "If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we've ignored for too long". And that is in itself a good start.