Nick Ut/AP Photo
Richard Trumka speaking in Los Angeles, September 9, 2013
Most union leaders are a bland bunch. As they rise up through the ranks, the fire they once had in their bellies turns to heartburn. Not so Rich Trumka, who, from the very start, stood apart from the labor movement’s gerontocracy.
He was a third-generation coal miner who earned a BA at Penn State and a law degree from Villanova. That could have been his ticket out of the coalfields, but Rich never really left. Instead, he became a lawyer for his union, the storied United Mine Workers of America, the UMWA, and part of the movement to rebuild it after the Miners for Democracy movement drove out Tony Boyle, the union’s notoriously corrupt president who’d engineered the 1969 murder of reformer Jock Yablonski.
After the election of two subsequent lackluster presidents, Rich led a ticket that ousted the incumbent. He was only 33 and soon gained attention both within and without the labor movement; he was even profiled by Rolling Stone.
Rich didn’t stand out only because he was young, but because he was a militant pragmatist—who over the course of a day could lead contract negotiations, walk a picket line, and schmooze on Capitol Hill. He understood that the labor movement could grow again only if it threw out the old rule book.
He broke the mold in another way. Rich was a gifted speaker who could fire up crowds like nobody’s business, relating heartbreaking stories of middle-class families he knew who were “holding on by their fingernails to stay in the middle class,” and following that with an impassioned call to action. “We’re pushing back for our jobs! We’re pushing back for our families! We’re pushing back for our future! And we are taking America back for the workers who built it!”
Rich was a bare-knuckle populist—an angry white man who was angry at the right people (and so effective that even Steve Bannon admired Rich, though he despised his politics). As is seldom the case with most labor leaders, Rich’s speeches mattered; they were an integral part of how he led.
He took those speeches very seriously. I know because beginning in 1990 I became Rich’s speechwriter. Originally, that wasn’t the plan. I’d done some speechwriting in the past, but I joined the staff as a writer for the union’s magazine. That changed when one day Rich’s chief of staff, Joe Corcoran, told me that I needed to write Rich a speech. Other staffers had written speeches for him, and he didn’t like any of them. Now it was my turn.
I forgot who the speech was for, but I handed Rich my draft and sat across from his desk. He was reading it closely, clicking his pen the entire time as if looking for whole sections to cross out. But when he reached the end, he looked up and said, “This is good.” He seemed more astonished than happy.
Over the years that followed, I collaborated with Rich on literally hundreds of speeches, op-eds, radio spots, and more. He was a speechwriter’s dream. He knew how to modulate his voice, he could be funny, he absorbed research like a sponge and had a great sense of timing. He also wanted his speeches to be substantive, not “pablum,” as he put it. And one topic he wanted to talk about was racism.
Rich was proud that the UMWA had been racially integrated from its start and believed that opposing racism was in the union’s DNA. It led him to join a small cadre of union leaders who came together to put ending apartheid on the labor movement’s agenda, at a time when AFL-CIO officials saw white-run South Africa as a new front in the Cold War that needed their defense. To a great extent, the dissident presidents succeeded. The UMWA went beyond the efforts of some others by working directly with the country’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to organize an international boycott of Royal Dutch Shell, a major player in South Africa’s economy. The union helped finance the creation of the NUM’s strike fund. Rich even hired an official of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) to barnstorm the U.S. to promote the anti-apartheid movement. Given the UMWA’s comparatively meager resources, the union was punching way beyond its weight. It’s a measure of Rich Trumka’s commitment that it did.
In 1995, a coalition of unions joined together to oust the AFL-CIO’s old guard. Rich was elected to its secretary-treasurer position and became the federation’s president in 2009 following John Sweeney’s retirement. During that time, I worked freelance, though I occasionally collaborated on speeches with Rich. One was his 2008 address to the United Steelworkers. Rich wanted to talk about several issues, but it was the final eight minutes that really counted. He minced no words:
“There’s not a single good reason for any worker—especially any union member—to vote against Barack Obama,” he said. “There’s only a bad reason: because he’s not white. And I want to talk about that.”
Thunderous applause broke out, then a standing ovation—first from the Black delegates, soon followed by whites.
While Rich’s speech will stand the test of time, his message has yet to be fully embraced by the labor movement he led.
Rich went on to describe the damage racism has done to the labor movement, how union activists could, and had to, turn around racist members. He described in detail a conversation he’d had with a woman in his hometown of Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, who admitted she wouldn’t vote for Obama because he was Black.
If Rich had urged the nationalization of basic industry, it might have raised an eyebrow or two, but talking about racism then was a bridge too far for a number of white labor leaders who believed any candid discussion of racism was divisive. (Once, I was going over a speech I’d written for another union president, and when he got to a passage where it slammed the Confederate flag, he told me, “Wait a minute, I have members who like the Confederate flag!”)
Rich was stunned by the public response to his speech. The YouTube video of his talk quickly amassed 600,000 views, making Rich the first, and only, labor leader to ever go viral.
Every obituary has referred to the Steelworkers speech; it’s an indelible part of Rich’s legacy. As the guy who collaborated on it with him, I know it’s the most important speech I’ve ever worked on or ever will.
But while Rich’s speech will stand the test of time, his message has yet to be fully embraced by the labor movement he led, as Black labor activists have pointed out.
“I believe Trumka could actually ‘see’ Black folks,” says Dwight Kirk, a veteran union staffer and a longtime activist in the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU). “His speech was bold and genuine, but Trumka’s empathy, vision, and honesty never filtered down to the state and local level. He leaves a labor movement still too white at the top and balking at reckoning with racial equity from within.”
The labor movement desperately needs leaders with the courage to pick up where Rich left off. That begins with white union heads at all levels understanding that while challenging racism will make some white members unhappy, it’s essential if unions are going be part of America’s future, not its past. A movement that, in Rich’s words, “isn’t afraid to fight and knows how to win because we know that the way things are isn’t the way things have to be.”
