Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
This has not been an easy posting to write, but I think it had to be done, whether progressives like it or not. I was originally going to post it to answer all the over-the-top praise issuing forth upon the death of Richard Trumka on August 5, 2021, but I try still to be a decent person, although it gets harder and harder: I thought a pause to honor a decent man was in order, not a critique. No such hesitation when Rush Limbaugh died, one of the greatest liars in American history, a title contested only by Trump.
It was statements like this from Senator Chuck Schumer which urged me to answer:
“’The working people of America have lost a fierce warrior at a time when we need him most,’ he said.”
Really? A fierce warrior was not what I heard just a year or so ago when he gave a summary of union successes, an upsurge in membership in his view, turning the long decline around after so many decades (yes decades, not years). His confident, even tempered optimism was in an interview, and Q & A at an annual Labor Day event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor newspaper. And a fierce warrior was not what I could locate in all the “watershed” Labor Day addresses that I had come to hope for from an AFL-CIO “chieftain” - or today, “chieftess,” — that I had come to believe objective circumstances for the bottom 60% of our society — and the “remnants” of the AFL-CIO of the late 1940’s early 1950’s - would have called forth. A union and left speech telling it like it is — the way I heard young Trump supporters tell me they saw him while we were looking out from Dan’s Rock’s 3,000’ high in Trump Country. And hence my choice of picture from the days when Walter Reuther was considered the “most dangerous man in Detroit” if not the country in the words of labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein.
No, the emotional component that strong eulogizers for Trumka seemed to attach to him in much the same way they attribute it to President Joe Biden was missing. Or had I missed something?
Therefore, before writing this I went to The Guardian, The New Republic, In These Times, Splinter News, Axios, National Review and the Daily Kos’ own Laura Clawson’s estimations of his career. And my own career background, briefly, in Union office holding and trench warfare, as well as the long published works of Mike Davis, Michael Harrington, Barry Bluestone, and Jefferson Cowie ( and the long forgotten works of George Lichtheim) to put the tributes and the critiques in perspective. A fair perspective if that is possible in the highly ideological matters of union work, even of union leaders who would hate the use of the word ideology. Unless it’s, in the words that the AFL-CIO’s leaders use themselves, about how they built the “middle class,” running away, verbally and by other associations, from that oh so easy to jettison label — working class. That tells you a lot in itself.
Now, before I swim out into the deeper and more dangerous broad currents of history, let me offer a few biographical details: of my life in the 1970’s in an AFSCME local, 2285 if I remember the number correctly, based in the public social service agency in Trenton, NJ, county of Mercer.
I was the Chief Steward and lead “contract” negotiator, heading in to see Nick Bartolino, the County Comptroller. Nick was a thick set man who seemed to me to personify the ethnic world of the old New Deal coalition, then falling apart in Mercer County, but still in control of most county offices, with the Religious Right’s Chris Smith about to leave them in the congressional dust. Nothing personal with Nick; to bring him to life though, for you, the best way would be to say he was a cast character before Tony Soprano’s famous series. What he thought of me, and the public Union I represented, I can only guess by the the half-dismissive and half-dictatorial tone of his speech to me and one other person from the Union who was in the room. In essence, and he didn’t say it with much regret, we had no maneuver room, the state budget dictated (literally) the size of the raise and most of the contract fulcrums, leaving not much to be negotiated. He was right on those matters. But that’s not why I walked out, shocking the accompanying union rep, “an ultra” and certainly Nick and the AFCME bureaucracy over my head at the county and state level — whom I had not consulted in advance.
What I did was unrehearsed, spontaneous to the insult flow of the meeting, and I have no regrets in doing so. In more modern terms I had been “dissed” and “dissed badly,” the whole essence of union purpose had been straight-jacketed in a politics and economics we were told was way outside our reach. So get used to it. Suckers.
Do you understand where I am going, here, about Mr. Trumka? If ever a set of circumstances facing not just American workers in the AFL-CIO, but the whole bottom 60% of the society were caught in a situation, just like, or even worse than the one Nick Bartolino shoved under my nose in the 1970’s, (and seemed to take extra delight in rubbing my nose in it) — this was it:
- A terribly low union membership record in the workforce, down, down since the 1950 high
- the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, $50 trillion, upwards, documented in a Rand study from Sept. 2020 in Time magazine, never mentioned by the AFL-CIO, Joe Biden or the Dems in the 2020 race…
- no national health care, with unions defending their old contract fruits from the glory days: the hell with the rest of society
-the disgraceful dismissal of the Green New Deal, the most progressive policy outline presented to the American people in its history, and the most insistent on enabling union membership — since the 1930’s and FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, which I don’t recall ever hearing quoted in an AFL-CIO address
-the trashing of the very idea of a “Just Transition” mechanism and fund in the Democratic party’s 500 page plus response to global warming...Trumka citing the fact that losing 100 jobs in rural PA with some promised vague new green jobs in Oregon was not a help… of course not...but the elements of a just transition are as obvious as the signal sent by Joe Manchin’s lobbying barge on the Potomac — and how he earns his money (thanks to the Intercept’s recent expose.)
- and the great inverse curves since the 1970’s: the rise of the Religious Right and its ideology, and the reverse curve of union membership...from an organization which if it ever had a passionate ideology, has walked away from it since the days when thugs tried to assassinate Walter Reuther in 1948.
- and the walking away from the Sanders campaigns of 2016, 2020, from the candidate who most embodied in language and spirit, and policy, the best of the old union leaders: Debs, Lewis, Reuther, Fraser...dare I even say Jerry Wurf? Angry Jerry Wurf daring to propose public sectors unions alongside of the rusting steel workers, auto workers... With Trumka pushing, in the very heart of the Daily Kos, E. Warren as the alternative. Canny, but too calculating .
That’s right, progressives and union supporters: we never got the speech, burning bridges behind it, if you like, but building new spans to all those left out of the “good old time” union pensions, medical and yes dental plans defended at the costs of universal health care today, and universal care for Nature to prevent it turning upon us in its great cycles of heat, energy and ocean currents, the full wrath of which, if physics allows a wrath, are only now hitting the AFL-CIO bureaucrats right in the lifeboats and smoky hazes drifting over DC and the rising waters of the Eastern seaboard.
We never got the tactics which younger, bolder more inclusive spirits have given us: like the early, nervy tactics of AOC outside of Speaker Pelosi’s office on behalf of Sunrisers , and their futures, (and before she was even sworn in to Congress), the “insolent” tone and factual presentations of Greta Thunberg at Davos, the UN and even before some members of the US Congress — exactly the spirit in which I walked out of Nick Bartolino’s office back in the late 1970’s, Michael Harrington and DSOC inspired as I was, (AOC’s forerunner organization to the DSA)…
No, if the objective facts of our time haven’t led to a walk out, or, at minimum, a richly deserved public tongue lashing of the Democratic Party since the days of Carter, broken promise after broken promise to the AFL-CIO ...as Greta has given our Davos rulers...then I don’t know what will or can.
Now, let me climb down from the pulpit and do justice to what I learned about the Trumka I didn’t know, the Trumka of the early days, and keeping in mind the words, wise or not, which Larry Summers delivered to the Winston Churchill of the European left in 2015, by phone, to Yanis Varoufakis: “Yanis, you can’t be an insider and outsider at the same time, you have to choose.”
When the former mine worker turned labor lawyer was the young Richard Trumka, he took risks in supporting striking miners in what many others would have called already “lost causes in a declining industry.” He was morally right and courageous in those stances in the 1980’s, and walked a fine line in his speeches between inspiration and being jailed for incitement to violence.
By all accounts I’ve come across, in his role as Treasurer of the AFL-CIO before rising to the top post, he has steered clear of the almost always hurled charges of embezzlement and pension raiding that have so scarred unions in the eyes of the public. No easy task, given the history of miner leadership before him.
He persevered through all the historical currents since Reagan, taking American society to the Right and the Democratic Party as well. Yet he couldn’t do what Bill Buckley had to do when he founded National Review, what Yanis V did in the negotiations with Euro bureaucrats in 2015 (which prompted Summers’ call) , what AOC did in those early 2019 protests and with her Green New Deal Resolution in February, and what Greta Thunberg has been doing all along: shouting at the abusive flows of history: stop, you’re killing us!
Now behind those powerful ideological currents running against unions are ideas, formulated by people, and not limited to just two books in their “inerrancy” as on the Right. Yes, there is a whole history of the left here (weaker) and in Western Europe (stronger) which has been under assault at many levels since the 1970’s and Thatcher and Reagan.
And it has been the inability of Trumka and the rest of the AFL-CIO leadership to draw upon that legacy, that rich and diverse intellectual heritage — the best of modern man in my opinion, that has also crippled the ability of labor in the US to inspire, despite the little shrines of light and hope, like AOC devotional candles, springing up around airline workers, fast-food workers, the Fight for $15 (even though it is far from adequate and way behind the math as I see it)...and the courageous nurses always being reminded of “their place” by doctors...(and who did they endorse in 2016 and 2020?) and that most elemental test of human dignity among these vicious currents of history: the fight for universal health and dental care — and eye care which might help restore the missing vision.
It is in this spirit that I honor Trumka’s early life and his apparent honesty, while recognizing he was not the person for the hour and the national need. So far, no one is, but you get the idea here from the other sources of inspiration I have listed, what is needed...
And to those admirers of Jane McAlevey I say this: I’m a fan of her fine tuned tactical advice on how to fight a union recognition campaign, but as indicated above, tactics can’t make up for the missing ideological drive, that near religious intensity that is necessary to generate sea changes in consciousness and then politics, that the left of the 1930’s had, but which disappeared even in those who once possessed it like the Reuther brothers (with the Treaty of Detroit and his phone conversations with LBJ on the war in Vietnam). And yes, the futile and destructive war in Vietnam and the AFL-CIO’s stance on it, was one of the watershed’s, if not the major one, which started unions and the nation on the downward spiral which has not yet run its course. Sorry for that bit of “conventional” observation...(I’m leaving out my personal story of interactions with retired union vets over the Green New Deal, very recently, but you see the flavoring they have added to my perspective.)
Best to you, and better, in the spirit and work of Hannah Arendt, that I deliver the writer’s obligation to tell the truth as I see it, and let the wrath fall where it may.
billofrights,
Frostburg, MD