AFL-CIO's Trumka calls for new strategies: 'Our basic system of workplace representation is failing'

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka isn't shying away from the hard facts of how effective the corporate war on unions has been. "To be blunt, our basic system of workplace representation is failing to meet the needs of America's workers by every critical measure," he acknowledged Thursday, speaking at a conference on New Models for Worker Representation. That fact has been evident for years now; as Trumka went on to say, "The numbers give us all the proof we need. Not even 7 percent of the private workforce in America has the security and stability of a union contract." The question is what the union movement can or will do about it.

Trumka's answer Thursday was to both highlight the ways the AFL-CIO has been opening itself up to new and different forms of organizing and reaching out to workers and to commit to find still more such ways, saying "The AFL-CIO's door has to be'and will be'open to any worker or group of workers who wants to organize and build power in the workplace." He cited Working America, which has begun recruiting members to industry committees "as a way to get closer to unions and begin to take collective action," as well as the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, worker centers, and workers who "do not neatly fit the legal definition of an employee," such as home care workers and taxi drivers.

Each of these, Trumka suggested, is a model that could conceivably succeed at building worker power in the future, and while acknowledging the dire statistics of recent years, he pointed out that such depressing moments have happened before and that workers who people thought could not be organized have been organized before, as we'll see below the fold.