AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
The AFL-CIO has been steadily expanding the ways it seeks to organize workers and its relationships with both non-union worker groups and non-labor progressive groups. From the AFL-CIO itself forming Working America to reach out to people who aren't union members to the National Taxi Workers Alliance getting an AFL-CIO charter to partnering with progressive organizations on things like immigration and green jobs, it's part of an effort to find a way forward for labor even as the picture has been getting bleaker for unions.
Now, with the labor federation's convention coming up, its president, Richard Trumka, has been detailing plans for even greater outreach and coalition-building, telling the Wall Street Journal last week that large grassroots groups like the NAACP and Sierra Club might get a decision-making role in the AFL-CIO. Trumka expands on that thinking in an interview with the Huffington Post:
"People who aren't part of a union and don't have a collective bargaining agreement will be able to come and join us," he said. "Progressive groups that we talk to who we were allied with in the past will be part of us and we'll talk together, we'll plan together, we'll strategize together, we'll educate together and we'll execute together."
"It used to be your issues and my issues," he added. "We want it to be our issues, whether it's a civil rights issue, a human rights issue, a women's issue, a race issue or a collective bargaining issue." [...]
"The opposition was really good at wedging us," he said. "The goal is to take that away from them, so that we're one single group that works together, that plans together and executes together. ... None of us are capable of doing it alone."
Today's Republican Party certainly helps make clear the common interests, with, for instance, governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker attacking union rights and women's rights alike. And progressives will be so much stronger if the fight back is a unified one. That's not to say it's likely to be easy or smooth—the AFL-CIO is a federation of dozens of unions, many with distinct interests as well as shared ones, now proposing to work hand in hand with organizations that have not only different goals but different cultures and relationships to their members. A Sierra Club member and a member of the Steelworkers have very different connections to the Sierra Club and the Steelworkers, respectively, and the responsibility the Sierra Club's leadership bears toward its members is just not the same as a union's responsibility for organizing workplaces, negotiating contracts, and handling workplace grievances. So no, coalition won't be easy. But it's to the union movement's credit and, hopefully, to its benefit and the benefit of the progressive movement more generally that the AFL-CIO is trying.