Thanks for your patience with this belated edition of our weekly roundup; after moving 700 miles with an infant, I am ready to get back to our regularly-programmed Thursday schedule. And double thanks to those of you who filled out the reader survey; lots of good feedback I plan to experiment with implementing in the coming weeks!
On Trumka..... the day I found out he died, I was sitting in my office - with about two dozen union members on my floor, and another 150+ union members on the other floors in the building (plus another 200 or so folks working remotely from home) and I realized... out of all these union members, I am probably the only person here who even knows who Richard Trumka was!
Now, I'm old enough to remember when union leaders were public figures - when I was a kid, people like Walter Reuther, Jimmy Hoffa, Cesar Chavez, Al Shanker and Victor Gotbaum were household names - major public figures and celebrities of a sort
Why?
Because they represented millions of workers, had the power to make the economy scream with a few picket signs and they (and, more importantly, their members) actually mattered
Rich Trumka and his generation of labor (mis)leaders presided over the collapse of all of that
Trumka and them succeeded in making labor....irrelevant to the lives of American workers, a toothless paper tiger that had no power over capital
the staff of the Texas AFL-CIO might believe in the fairy tale of "just transition" (or might have their own cynical reasons for pretending to).... but I wonder how many oil field, refinery and industrial maintenace workers are gullible enough to fall for that?
On Trumka..... the day I found out he died, I was sitting in my office - with about two dozen union members on my floor, and another 150+ union members on the other floors in the building (plus another 200 or so folks working remotely from home) and I realized... out of all these union members, I am probably the only person here who even knows who Richard Trumka was!
Now, I'm old enough to remember when union leaders were public figures - when I was a kid, people like Walter Reuther, Jimmy Hoffa, Cesar Chavez, Al Shanker and Victor Gotbaum were household names - major public figures and celebrities of a sort
Why?
Because they represented millions of workers, had the power to make the economy scream with a few picket signs and they (and, more importantly, their members) actually mattered
Rich Trumka and his generation of labor (mis)leaders presided over the collapse of all of that
Trumka and them succeeded in making labor....irrelevant to the lives of American workers, a toothless paper tiger that had no power over capital
That's his legacy....and it's kinda pathetic, TBH
the staff of the Texas AFL-CIO might believe in the fairy tale of "just transition" (or might have their own cynical reasons for pretending to).... but I wonder how many oil field, refinery and industrial maintenace workers are gullible enough to fall for that?