Can Trumka deliver?

THE U.S. labor movement has a new leader at a time of great peril--but does it have a new strategy that can meet the challenges of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s?

Richard Trumka's ascension to the presidency of the AFL-CIO will likely give the labor federation--still weakened from a split in 2005--a more assertive voice. Significantly, AFL-CIO convention delegates voted to approve a resolution calling for a Medicare-for-all, "single-payer" system, and also reaffirmed antiwar positions taken at the 2005 convention.

There were other notable changes: Liz Shuler takes over from Trumka as Secretary-Treasurer--at 39, she is the youngest-ever to hold that post. Arlene Holt Baker was elected Executive Vice President, the first African American woman to gain that position. And Trumka is pushing an initiative to organize young workers--an effort critical to labor's renewal.

So Trumka takes over with a new look for a federation often called "pale, male and stale."

It should be recalled, though, Trumka has been around for 14 years--time enough to have had an impact on the direction of the labor federation. His ascension was long expected--and long overdue, given outgoing president John Sweeney's broken promise to retire years ago.

Trumka, the former president of the United Mine Workers of America, was known for aggressive tactics in the 1989 Pittston coal strike. Many in the labor movement believed--or at least hoped--that he would propel the agenda that Sweeney outlined when he took over the AFL-CIO in 1995.

In fact, there was a brief moment in the '90s when it looked like Sweeney's AFL-CIO would offer a tougher response to the employers' anti-labor onslaught. During the victorious 1997 UPS strike, Sweeney stood on the picket line beside then-Teamsters President Ron Carey, a reformer who had ousted the federation's old guard. The Teamsters won a resounding victory--and labor appeared poised to surge forward.

There were some other important strike victories in the months afterward. But an employer-sponsored witch-hunt of Carey led to his ouster on charges of corruption--and AFL-CIO leaders did nothing. Prosecutors alleged that Trumka himself participated in a money-laundering effort to help Carey's re-election effort in the Teamsters, but Trumka was never prosecuted. It was clearly an effort to intimidate Trumka, Sweeney and any other labor leader who stood up to employers or the government.

While Sweeney's rhetoric was more militant than his conservative predecessor, Lane Kirkland, the New Voices leadership was always interested in union-management partnership.

Sweeney sought a return to the 1950s and 1960s, when leaders of Big Labor and Big Business hashed out national contracts covering millions of workers, and Big Government acted as referee. In reality, labor was always a junior partner--and employers only tolerated unions. Beginning in the early 1970s, Corporate America launched a war on unions that continues unabated to this day.

Thus, the Sweeney years saw labor's continued slide in the percentage of workers represented by unions, even though stronger organizing efforts did boost the total number of workers in unions in recent years. Today, unions--which once represented about a third of workers in the 1950s, almost all at private employers--represent just 7.6 percent of workers in the private sector and 12.4 percent overall. The job losses in the current recession will drive that number still lower.

GIVEN THE rhetoric of the New Voices team in 1995, one might have expected labor to respond to these attacks with protests and action.

Instead, Sweeney kept a fairly low profile and focused on gearing up labor's political operation, even as the federation blew through millions of dollars and was hammered financially by the 2005 breakaway of Change to Win, a union coalition that took away some of the AFL-CIO's biggest affiliates, including the Service Employees International Union, the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers union (another union, UNITE HERE, has since re-affiliated).

One of the chief complaints of the Change to Win unions was that the AFL-CIO was spending too much on politics and not enough on organizing--although the SEIU itself went all-out for the 2008 elections and the breakaway unions have had little success in organizing, either.

For the AFL-CIO, the consequences have been grim. As journalist JoAnn Wypijewski put it:

[The balance sheet] is steeped in red now. The numbers aren't fully known, but the federation's debt is said by one union leader to be in the neighborhood of $24 million. The money gained from royalties on the Union Plus card, which once accounted for something like 30 percent of the federation's revenue, has been blown, as have most of the operating reserves. What had been a $66 million surplus in 2000 has vanished, to the point where the Machinists' Tom Buffenbarger warned earlier in the year that "insolvency might be right around the corner."

None of this, however, impeded the federation's spending on politics: $40 million on the 2006 elections, $7.5 million lobbying in 2007 and 2008 combined, $54 million on the 2008 elections. That in turn is dwarfed by the $250 million spent in the last election by all the AFL's affiliated unions.

At one level, this was a success: Democrats again control both houses of Congress and the White House after 14 years dominated by the Republicans. The question is, what will labor get for its efforts?

The unions' top legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would simplify the process of union organizing, has been gutted and set aside in Congress and ignored by the White House.

Nevertheless, President Barack Obama got a hero's welcome at the AFL-CIO convention. The president declared that he "stands behind" EFCA, and touted the federal government's bailout of General Motors as saving jobs--even though the terms of the government's loans to the company involved the elimination of thousands of union jobs.

Shortly before the convention, the Obama administration did throw labor a bone in the form of a 35 percent duty on tires imported from China--in response to a request from the United Steelworkers union, which claims that 7,000 jobs in the U.S. have been lost due to unfair competition. This set the stage for repeated China-bashing at the convention, as several keynote speakers sounded old-school "Buy American" themes as the solution to job losses and the downward slide of living standards.

For example, a resolution passed calling for a "National Strategy for Economic Recovery and Sustained Growth" reads:

We urge Congress to introduce and pass a comprehensive trade bill giving our government the tools it needs to address the Chinese government's currency manipulation and illegal subsidies, strengthening our trade laws and their enforcement, ensuring the safety of our imports and protecting intellectual property rights. The Obama administration must address all these issues, as well as systematic workers' rights violations, in its bilateral dialogue with the Chinese government.

Certainly China's violation of workers and human rights should be a concern of labor organizations everywhere.

But targeting China for protectionist measures inevitably undercuts what's really needed--international solidarity with Chinese workers, who, by the way, could teach U.S. labor leaders a lesson or two about how to conduct protests against rapacious employers.

And China isn't responsible for public sector workers' pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs from coast to coast. It isn't Chinese bureaucrats who are to blame for an economic stimulus plan that puts rebuilding highway on-ramps ahead of constructing schools or hiring more teachers, let alone stopping layoffs.

China isn't funneling trillions of dollars to bail out banks and paying bankers' bonuses with U.S. taxpayer money. It isn't Chinese bureaucrats who are pouring millions into lobbying efforts to keep U.S. workers from organizing. And it was--to repeat the point--Barack Obama, not Chinese officials, who imposed a "rescue" of the U.S. auto industry that required United Auto Workers not only to eliminate jobs, but also eliminate decades of work rules and gut benefits.

At its worst, the China-bashing recalls labor's terrible Cold War history, when top labor leaders were integral parts of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, helping to smash left-wing labor dissidents in U.S. allies in the Third World and promoting stooge unions in their place.

While these "AFL-CIA" operations were given a makeover in the Sweeney years as the labor federation supported more progressive figures internationally, they've never been abandoned--and labor's foreign policy operations are funded almost entirely by government money.

IF TRUMKA is going to revive U.S. labor, he'll have to do it with the kind of grassroots organizing seen by AFL-CIO leaders as irrelevant or unwelcome. While its unrealistic to expect the AFL-CIO to transform itself entirely--it is, after all, a bureaucracy on top of a bureaucracy--the federation could give important struggles a high profile and promote solidarity.

That's exactly why workers in the Illinois "War Zone" struggles of 1994-1995 looked to Trumka when he took over as AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer. The locked-out workers at the A.E. Staley food processing plant and the strikers at Bridgestone-Firestone and Caterpillar hoped Trumka could mobilize national support for the struggle.

But the promised support never materialized, and these important struggles ended in defeat. And during eight years of George W. Bush's relentlessly anti-union reign, the AFL-CIO never once called a national protest in Washington.

Now that Trumka is calling the shots, will labor be willing to take the streets of the capital and demand change?

If it means challenging Barack Obama directly, the answer is almost certainly "no." For all the talk of a tougher union leadership under Trumka, Democratic control of the White House and Congress means that the AFL-CIO will continue to be drawn into the Washington insiders' game--which means labor's agenda will be an adjunct to the Democrats, and set aside whenever it gets in the way of White House priorities.

The irony is striking: Under Republican rule, labor leaders claimed that all resources must be put into electing Democrats, rather than mobilizing or demonstrating. But under Democrats, labor must work with its allies--which means no mobilizing or demonstrating.

Perhaps the scale of the crisis will force the AFL-CIO to do more, and Trumka will prove more open to action than Sweeney. But that's only going to happen if there's a big push from below--both within the unions and from workers outside them who press ahead with organizing on their own.

The U.S. working class needs a fighting labor movement now more than ever. But the initiative to build one is going to have to come from the grassroots.