Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in 2017
Rich Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO who died suddenly today of a heart attack, was born and raised in Nemacolin, a small town near Pittsburgh. If anyone could claim to be a son of the white working class—that onetime anchor of the New Deal coalition that has drifted steadily rightward in recent decades—it surely was Trumka. His father was a second-generation Polish American who worked in the mines; his mother was an Italian American homemaker. Trumka himself worked in the mines while attending college, and once he got his law degree, he became a staff lawyer for the United Mine Workers. He was no stranger to the rituals of Pennsylvania blue-collar, white manhood, deer hunting most particularly.
This backstory made Trumka’s efforts to course-correct that white working-class rightward movement all the more authentic and blunt. In the summer of 2008, when that rightward movement was taking the form of opposition to Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency, Trumka, then the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer, went to Pittsburgh to address the convention of the Steelworkers and confront that opposition head-on.
“We can’t tap dance around the fact that there are a lot of white folks out there who just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a Black man,” Trumka said. He talked about his recent discussions with his onetime Nemacolin neighbors, and recounted what he had told them: that Obama’s policies would help working-class voters of all races, and that there was “only one really, really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama. And that’s because he’s not white.”
Those were his people who’d gone astray, and Trumka (with the help of the great labor speechwriter Jim Grossfeld) would do his damnedest to bring them back to where they could help themselves by voting for progressives. He repeated versions of that speech throughout the fall, and its YouTube recording went viral, which was a first, surely, for any presentation by a union official.
Trumka knew that labor needed course corrections if it was to pull its weight in the battle for a more social democratic America.
Despite his efforts, Trumka knew that labor alone couldn’t really arrest the rightward drift of working-class whites. That, he knew, would require the Democrats to end their romance with globalization, with budget-balancing, with the lures of the market. Like many labor leaders I’ve known, he privately loved Bernie Sanders and his social democratic platform, even as realpolitik dictated his support for Democratic lesser-evils. One element of the tragedy of Trumka’s sudden death is that he didn’t live to see the enactment of some of that platform under the presidency of Joe Biden (assuming, of course, that the Democrats actually enact it).
Trumka also knew that labor itself needed course corrections if it was to pull its weight in the battle for a more social democratic America. As president of the legendary but much shrunken United Mine Workers (a post to which he was elected when he was just 33 years old), he led one of the few successful strikes of Reagan-Age America, a nine-month pitched battle against Pittston Coal, which was determined to claw back much of the pay and benefits that previous generations of mineworkers had won. At Trumka’s direction, mineworkers participated in nonviolent civil disobedience and community organizing, and the union also waged the kind of successful public relations campaign that would have been anathema to John L. Lewis, its storied president from the 1920s through the 1950s. Lewis’s mineworkers had so much power that they didn’t need PR to win strikes. Trumka, understanding that those days were gone but that militancy was still, as ever, indispensable, steered the union to an improbable victory.
In so doing, he made himself one of the union leaders to whom labor progressives turned in 1995 when they sought to oust Lane Kirkland, for whom hardline Cold War anti-communism mattered more than the American labor movement’s dwindling prospects, from the AFL-CIO presidency. The ticket of John Sweeney for president and Trumka for secretary-treasurer prevailed at the Federation’s convention that year, a changeover symbolized by Trumka’s acceptance speech, in which he reeled off a list of labor champions that included such Kirkland-regime bête-noirs as prominent feminists, minority activists and DSA founder Michael Harrington. (At the mention of Harrington, one old guard union leader on the podium visibly blanched.)
By the time Trumka succeeded Sweeney as the AFL-CIO’s president in 2009, the Federation, like the labor movement itself, was a much shrunken entity. Despite the best efforts of unionists of all tendencies, labor had (and has) been unable to overcome the legal obstacles that made it prey to American business’s pathological opposition to worker power. A number of major unions, including the Teamsters and the Service Employees, had left the Federation in 2005, and the decline in membership had forced cutbacks at the AFL-CIO. In recent years, a number of the Federation’s largest unions—the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in particular—pitched in during election season to pick up some of the slack created by the Federation’s diminished membership and finances.
Despite these constraints, Trumka continued Sweeney’s commitment to working closely with other progressive movements, to pushing the policy envelope leftwards (Trumka chaired the board of the Economic Policy Institute), to promoting a vision of the common good that was sometimes broader than that of some of his union brothers and sisters. He was a staunch supporter of immigrant rights, and in an interview last weekend, he backed universal COVID vaccinations because they saved workers’ lives; other unions, while supportive of vaccinations, have resisted vaccine mandates in the workplace.
Trumka had announced that he would step down at the AFL-CIO’s quadrennial convention next year. For now, he will be succeeded by Federation Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, at least until the executive committee meets to designate a successor. Shuler, the first woman to serve as secretary-treasurer, and now the first as provisional president, was widely expected to run to succeed Trumka next year, with her core support coming from the building trade unions. (Shuler was previously an activist and then an official of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.) How Trumka’s death will affect what appeared to be shaping up as a genuine contest for the AFL-CIO presidency between Shuler and a challenger backed by more progressive unions (such as the Flight Attendants’ Sara Nelson) is anybody’s guess.
Under Biden, a number of the causes Trumka had promoted for decades have begun to bear some fruit. The reconciliation bill that will be presented to the Senate contains provisions greatly increasing the financial penalties on employers who violate the worker rights laid out in the National Labor Relations Act, one element of the wholesale rewriting of labor law that Trumka had long advocated. He leaves a labor movement battling against the plutocracy that has surged over the past four decades, with the tenacity that he himself repeatedly displayed.
