(Bloomberg News circulated the following story by Holly Rosenkrantz on June 8, 2009.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was briefing union leaders gathered in a conference room lined with portraits of the labor federation’s past leaders. He turned a page in his notes, looked up and made an announcement: He was backing his lieutenant, Richard Trumka, as his successor.
Instead of applause there was silence, said two labor leaders who were among about a dozen in the room for the meeting. The lack of enthusiasm reflected doubt about Trumka’s ability to revitalize the U.S. labor movement, according to the leaders, who asked not to be identified describing the April meeting at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington.
Months after labor’s candidates won the White House and added seats in Congress, the movement’s top legislative goal has stalled, a leader of the AFL-CIO has said its deteriorating finances were masked through “creative accounting,” and hopes are fading that unions that split from the largest U.S. labor organization almost four years ago will rejoin anytime soon.
Trumka’s 14-year tenure as secretary-treasurer of the AFL- CIO, which says it has 11 million members, and three terms as president of the United Mine Workers of America make him a poor agent of change when that’s what organized labor needs, said labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein.
“It’s unlikely Trumka will bring a radical shift in direction to the labor movement,” said Lichtenstein, who has written books about unions. “He’s not a new, fresh face.”
Nor is the rise of Trumka, 59, likely to help end the rift between the Washington-based AFL-CIO, with its 56 unions, and Change to Win, the seven unions that split off, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, based in Washington. His ascension may occur just as talks on reuniting are at a delicate stage, she said.
Timing ‘an Obstacle’
“The timing of the AFL-CIO election may be an obstacle to reunification,” said Weingarten, whose union is in the AFL-CIO.
The limits to labor’s political clout are reflected in its unsuccessful lobbying so far to win passage of so-called card- check legislation, which would make it easier for unions to organize. While President Barack Obama has endorsed the measure at the top of labor’s agenda, the main sponsor, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, has said it won’t win passage unless major provisions are revamped.
The AFL-CIO will meet in Pittsburgh in September to pick its first new president in 14 years. Trumka, who is currently in charge of the federation’s finances, is running unopposed.
Potential challengers may be committed to running their own unions, or have personal concerns that prevent them for jumping into the contest, said Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
‘Sound’ Values
Alison Omens, an AFL-CIO spokeswoman, said Trumka wasn’t ready to talk about his leadership bid. Trumka and Sweeney weren’t available to comment, Omens said.
Trumka “has the heart and intellectual capacity to do a great job,” United Steelworkers of America President Leo Gerard, a supporter, said in an interview.
In a statement endorsing Trumka’s bid to be federation president, the Ohio AFL-CIO said he is expected to “lead an aggressive bottom-up program to rebuild the American labor movement.”
Trumka as president will face a chronic ailment of the union movement: declining membership. Unions represent 7.6 percent of the private-sector workforce, down from a high of about 35 percent in the 1950s, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Critics such as Lichtenstein, who is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, question whether Trumka can win over the service-industry workers that unions are struggling to organize.
Pennsylvania Miner
Trumka followed his grandfather and father into coal- mining, going to work at a mine near his hometown of Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, when he was 19. Rising in the United Mine Workers, he led two strikes against coal companies.
“He certainly is a rousing speaker with a great American story,” said Lichtenstein. “But if you are a Latina nurse’s aide in Southern California, what do you want with a miner in charge?”
Labor leaders say they have had more achievements in the opening months of Obama’s administration than in the previous eight years under Republican George W. Bush, when unions had little influence in policy making and said they were under siege in Washington.
The first legislation Obama signed made it easier for U.S. workers to win pay-discrimination lawsuits, and he named union activists to the National Labor Relations Board and to administration posts. Trumka serves on Obama’s newly created Economic Recovery Advisory Board, along with Service Employees International Union Secretary-Treasury Anna Burger.
Healing Rift
Former Representative David Bonior, a Michigan Democrat, is leading private talks to heal the rift over priorities that caused unions, led by the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union, to bolt the AFL-CIO. SEIU President Andy Stern declined to comment on the unification efforts.
The departure of the Change to Win unions cost the AFL-CIO more than $13.9 million in annual revenue, according to an internal report by Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers based in Washington.
The federation’s net assets declined to a negative $2.3 million as of June 30, 2008, from a $66 million surplus on Jan. 1, 2000, according to union financial records filed with the Labor Department.
‘Creative Accounting’
The AFL-CIO used “creative accounting” to hide the deficit as it developed, Buffenbarger, a member of the AFL-CIO finance committee and president of one of the nation’s largest unions, wrote in his report, which he made public on May 27 after Bloomberg News obtained it.
“A new leadership — leaders chosen by our members, leaders held accountable by our members — is needed,” Buffenbarger wrote. “We want to see more focus on our members and less focus on a few oversized egos,” he said, without mentioning any names.
Trumka also carries the political baggage of past fights, said Victor Kamber, a Democratic political consultant.
“Like anyone who serves a long time, you make close friends and you have detractors,” said Kamber, a former AFL-CIO official, in an interview.
In 1997, Trumka invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a federal investigation into illegal contributions to Ron Carey’s re-election campaign as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Carey was indicted on federal charges that he lied repeatedly in the investigation. Among the allegations was that Carey lied when he denied having conversations with his campaign manager about getting Trumka to help him raise money.
Grounds for Removal
Carey was acquitted in 2001 after a four-week trial in New York. Trumka wasn’t charged. AFL-CIO bylaws say that taking the Fifth Amendment is grounds for removal for office. Sweeney let Trumka continue to serve, saying that Trumka had explicitly denied any wrongdoing.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Trumka won attention for a speech he gave telling union members it was wrong to vote against Obama because he is black.
“We can’t tap-dance around the fact that there are a lot of white folks out there,” many of them “good union people,” who “just can’t get past this idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man,” Trumka said at a steelworkers convention in Las Vegas.
Andrew Sullivan, a columnist for the Atlantic, called Trumka’s speech “pretty amazing,” and video of it attracted more than 500,000 hits on YouTube.com. “To see a white man take on racism this way is very moving,” Sullivan wrote.
Specter’s Opposition
This year, Trumka has been aggressive in pushing lawmakers to back the card-check bill as its support in the Senate waned. He threatened to withhold labor backing from Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who opposes the legislation in its current form. Specter faces re-election next year after defecting from the Republican Party to the Democrats.
“We won’t be bludgeoned into supporting him just because important people, like the president, are,” Trumka said.