Millions Would Join Them on the Ramparts




An open letter to Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO
by Ralph Nader
Dear Mr. Trumka,

You have come to your leadership position of our country’s labor federation of unions with 13 million members the hard way. Starting by working in the coal mines, then becoming a lawyer, heading the United Mine Workers, then becoming the Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO before assuming your present position in 2009, who can pull rank on you in the formal labor movement?
President Obama with president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka.
Yet, the AFL-CIO’s public leadership in three major areas has been far less effective than one would expect. I am referring to your less than assertive response to President Obama: 1) turning his back on raising the federal minimum wage; 2) failing to advance his card check promise to you in 2008; and 3) dropping the ball on backing long-overdue safety and health responsibilities of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

I say this with the awareness of your group’s public stands in favor of these three crucial matters to working families. But as you well know, there is a very marked difference between being on-the-record, as the AFL-CIO is, and being on-the-daily ramparts pushing these issues, as your organization is not.

Even just making a statement, however, took a back seat in your March 13, 2012 endorsement of Barack Obama for a second term as president. In what ways has Mr. Obama “moved aggressively,” as you declared, “to protect workers rights, pay, health and safety on the job?”

He has neither championed nor pressed Congress, when the Democrats were in control in 2009-2010, to give you card check which you have long-said was needed to reverse the serious decline and expand the ranks of organized labor by millions of workers (you told me this in 2004).

Second, Mr. Obama appointed an excellent head of OSHA and then betrayed OSHA – an agency that has estimated 58,000 workplace-related American deaths a year from disease and trauma! That is over 1000 people a week, every week, on the average.

Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor and the head of OSHA, cannot get White House approval for issuing long-overdue standards or strengthening weak and outdated standards such as the woefully inadequate silica rule, to save American lives not threatened by terrorists, but by corporate negligence or worse. Why have you not exposed this reality in public? Has Mr. Obama, whom you have socialized with at White House viewings of the Super Bowl, ever invited you to come across Lafayette Square to discuss this serious ongoing, preventable tragedy?

Had he taken worker concerns seriously, he might have asked you why the AFL-CIO for many years, has retained at its large national headquarters so few full-time advocates on occupational health and safety? And you in turn might have asked him why his politicos are blocking Dr. Michaels and why he is content in having only $550 million for OSHA’s annual budget while the U.S. spent $675 million in 2011 paying corporate contractors to guard the overbuilt U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Are these the Obama “values” you extolled in your endorsement statement?

More dismaying is your touting Mr. Obama for aggressively protecting workers’ pay. By pushing for more NAFTA type “pull-down” trade agreements through Congress, and not moving to revise NAFTA as he promised in his 2008 presidential campaigns, he is undermining both workers’ pay and jobs. By totally abandoning his pledge made to over 30 million workers in 2008 that he would press for a $9.50/hour federal minimum wage by 2011, he left them defenseless with more debt and fewer necessities of life.

The AFL-CIO wants at the least to catch up to 1968 with an inflation-adjusted $10/hour minimum wage law. Where is the visible muscular campaign for such legislation? Keeping up with inflation for the federal minimum wage is historically supported by 70 percent of the people. That includes many Republicans and even Rick Santorum and, until his latest flip-flop, Mitt Romney. A $10 minimum wage, after years of windfall price increases and executive compensation windfalls at labor’s expense, would annually pump tens of billions of dollars into greater consumer demand by low-income families in this recessionary economy.

What is the AFL-CIO waiting for? Hundreds of non-profit organizations will follow your lead. Talk is not enough. Resources and muscular lobbying are required along with far more relevant and tough public advertisements than your members are seeing and paying for on TV these days. Enough, already, of the general feel-good mood spots on TV.

The AFL-CIO is in a deep, defensive rut when in these tough times it should be in an aroused, innovative state of high alert and aggressive action. Workers in the 1930s’ Depression were in worse shape than workers today, yet organized labor was more militant.
As someone who in earlier days had been a dig-in-your-heels labor negotiator in fights with management, what did you receive for millions of American workers in your early, blanket endorsement of Mr. Obama? No wonder he can get away with giving the trade union movement and unorganized workers the back of his hand. You have unnecessarily allowed him to believe that you have nowhere to go. This is another way of saying that the Republicans, by being worse than the bad Democrats, are holding the American labor movement hostage to the corporatist Democratic Party.

People inside and outside the AFL-CIO know the problems. They are: complacent bureaucratic rigidity, fractious relations between member unions over how supine they need to be to Obama and the Democrats (with their costly wars), the lack of union democracy and competitive elections both within member unions and at the AFL-CIO plus, except for a few unions like the California Nurses Association, a distinct lack of sustained fervor and money for organizing drives.

You know all this only too well. Yet, as a 14th Century Chinese philosopher once said, “to know and not to do is not to know.” Unless you shake the AFL-CIO up and reorder its priorities against the corporate state, expect another four years of an Obamabush Administration.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/30-5

your Leaders are screwing you with the help of the Corporate State!

Trumka is a Marxist DIRTBAG. The labor elite are using the workers as useful idiots.

all unions should be disbanded... worthless and just driving prices up... not to mention making manufacturing plants move overseas...or to mexico, like chevy did...(while using barrys bailout money)

Realy? I gross over a thousand a week on an eight hour day with an hour of breaks and lunches off that, pension and cadilac medical so personaly I dont feel screwed.

However politicaly unions are lacking in many ways an examplewould be the minimum wage, had it kept up with inflation from 1968 it would be around ten bucks an hour.

Get it?

If you make less than ten bucks an hour your actualy makeing less than a worker on minimum wage in 1968.

Not to mention the increases in insurence co pays and premiums.

No I am not the one getting screwed here.

Best Buy is closing 50 stores,but i think thats do to Obama not buying enough electronics from them.

I think union workers are overpaid and thats Obamas fault cause he didn't buy enough electronics from Best Buy.

no, your union is actually screwing everyone else by paying you that much. all it does it drive prices on products way up to compensate for your pay and medical premiums. the union employees are not getting screwed.

You do understand facts do not support your self delusion?

Its no accident that the 1% have managed to increase wealth while driveing down wages. Not by a little but by a great deal.

the Unions are part of that vaunted 1% of yours!
They are taking you to the Cleaners,and you think that's proper!

you don't have to try to justify anything to me, it's your job, enjoy. nothing you can say is going to make me believe unions are beneficial to anyone but themselves.

Yes, really, the economy has YET to be destroyed ENOUGH before your "great deal" is put on the chopping block.

Once their power is consolidated, your Labor masters will throw you under the bus and dispose of you... Once they don't need you anymore, you will be the first to go. Read your history

Guess our Lord and Saviour will need that second term to finish it all off. I already know how you will be voting.

In the meantime, big labor and the communists who have taken over the Federal Government will continue to rape the taxpayers in favor of Union support to stay in power...GM ring any bells?

Oh, and when the entire sh@thouse finally DOES come crashing down...we will only hear how capitalism has "failed."

Enjoy your 1000$ weekly paydays, hour lunches, multiple breaks, pension and cadillac medical while you have them...

they won't last very much longer because parasites always kill the host...

Yes, really, the economy has YET to be destroyed ENOUGH before your "great deal" is put on the chopping block.

Once their power is consolidated, your Labor masters will throw you under the bus and dispose of you... Once they don't need you anymore, you will be the first to go. Read your history

Guess our Lord and Saviour will need that second term to finish it all off. I already know how you will be voting.

In the meantime, big labor and the communists who have taken over the Federal Government will continue to rape the taxpayers in favor of Union support to stay in power...GM ring any bells?

Oh, and when the entire sh@thouse finally DOES come crashing down...we will only hear how capitalism has "failed."

Enjoy your 1000$ weekly paydays, hour lunches, multiple breaks, pension and cadillac medical while you have them...

they won't last very much longer because parasites always kill the host...

Yes, really, the economy has YET to be destroyed ENOUGH before your "great deal" is put on the chopping block.

Once their power is consolidated, your Labor masters will throw you under the bus and dispose of you... Once they don't need you anymore, you will be the first to go. Read your history

Guess our Lord and Saviour will need that second term to finish it all off. I already know how you will be voting.

In the meantime, big labor and the communists who have taken over the Federal Government will continue to rape the taxpayers in favor of Union support to stay in power...GM ring any bells?

Oh, and when the entire sh@thouse finally DOES come crashing down...we will only hear how capitalism has "failed."

Enjoy your 1000$ weekly paydays, hour lunches, multiple breaks, pension and cadillac medical while you have them...

they won't last very much longer because parasites always kill the host...

Yes, really, the economy has YET to be destroyed ENOUGH before your "great deal" is put on the chopping block.

Once their power is consolidated, your Labor masters will throw you under the bus and dispose of you... Once they don't need you anymore, you will be the first to go. Read your history

Guess our Lord and Saviour will need that second term to finish it all off. I already know how you will be voting.

In the meantime, big labor and the communists who have taken over the Federal Government will continue to rape the taxpayers in favor of Union support to stay in power...GM ring any bells?

Oh, and when the entire sh@thouse finally DOES come crashing down...we will only hear how capitalism has "failed."

Enjoy your 1000$ weekly paydays, hour lunches, multiple breaks, pension and cadillac medical while you have them...

they won't last very much longer because parasites always kill the host...

Yes, really, the economy has YET to be destroyed ENOUGH before your "great deal" is put on the chopping block.

Once their power is consolidated, your Labor masters will throw you under the bus and dispose of you... Once they don't need you anymore, you will be the first to go. Read your history

Guess our Lord and Saviour will need that second term to finish it all off. I already know how you will be voting.

In the meantime, big labor and the communists who have taken over the Federal Government will continue to rape the taxpayers in favor of Union support to stay in power...GM ring any bells?

Oh, and when the entire sh@thouse finally DOES come crashing down...we will only hear how capitalism has "failed."

Enjoy your 1000$ weekly paydays, hour lunches, multiple breaks, pension and cadillac medical while you have them...

they won't last very much longer because parasites always kill the host...

Blah blah been enjoying it for the last twenty years and only have ten more to go if I take an early out.

I will toss myself under the bus after that

The only thing that seprates me from those who work for less is a collective voice I am no better than most but I am smart enough to know their is strength in unity we have managed to keep up with inflation and my privatly owned company prospers and is groweing that is a reality. Thanks to our hard efforts due to our good additudes with a fair days pay for a fair days work.

Now it is time to enjoy the fruits of my labors with some wine.

You can have the last word I am out.....

You just can't be in a Union and also complain about manufacturing leaving this country. It truly is the Unions fault on that one. There are plenty of over paid unions jobs, especially the ones that are unskilled and uneducated ones. (I have even heard this from people who used to be union workers). Then there is the crap with, well this guy "could" fix it but its not his job and we have to wait for a few hours for the guy whose job it is to fix this to show up. Thus we will stop production and sit around until then. Or the one guy who sits around doing nothing unless the 1 thing in his job description happens.

The Unions could buck up and save America! If they would just send all their staff, organizers, and leaders to China to convert those poor souls to the Union Mentality ....

hey good thinking... then they could ruin china's economy too!