Old Labor Asks New Labor for Help as Strike Looms at Patriot Coal

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174940/old-labor-asks-new-labor-help-strike-looms-patriot-coal#axzz2WlPuTg00

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka addressed a gathering of labor activists in Washington this week and told them that he needed them.

“The future of America is at risk,” he said “because we have a democracy deficit and a solidarity deficit, and nowhere is that truer in our national life than in the workplace.”

The sentiment was less startling than the context, at the second annual conference of the Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN). LRAN attracts organizers largely from community-based workers’ centers and training and research groups who work with low-wage, immigrant and part time, non-union workers. The biggest guy in Big Labor, in other words, a man who came up through the nation’s oldest industrial union (the United Mine Workers), was asking the newest organizers on the scene—the fast-food, retail, restaurant, day labor and domestic workers—for help.

“How do we thicken relationships to both encourage experimentation and knit together a united labor movement?” he asked.



Read more: Old Labor Asks New Labor for Help as Strike Looms at Patriot Coal | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/blog/174940/old-labor-asks-new-labor-help-strike-looms-patriot-coal#ixzz2X8OCH3r0
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[Starry Messenger]

1. k&r

[socialist_n_TN]

2. Sounds like some solidarity building with the groups.....

that would be less hobbled by Taft-Hartley. I recently began an article about these alternative labor organizations and how they could help with strikes in the regular unions. Good to see that Trumpka is taking advantage of THEIR advantages.

[byeya]

3. Trumpka is basically a great guy. He tried his best to start a Labor Party while he was president

of the UMW(maybe he was secretary back then, I forget) but labor was still hitched to the Democratic party. Trumpka as Pres of the AFL-CIO has kept its close ties with the Democratic Party and gotten the short end of the stick: It's something that was expected of him because he has to try to keep a lot of conservative trade unions in the federation. He has made statements and encouraged progressive unions to say they'll deal with the Dems on an issue by issue basis which, I think,is to the good.

It's going to take secondary boycotts - now ruled illegal - to win large scale strikes in industries like mining. Will people put themselves at risk?

[Egalitarian Thug]

4. This is great, as far as it goes.

I'd like to see the unions start to consider using what little power they still hold in new ways, however. The strategies that were developed almost a century ago are just not effective due to the fact that we have passed so many laws that neuter them.
& R