AFL-CIO urges workers to vote their wallets

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9595.html

By VICTORIA MCGRANE | 4/14/08 11:49 PM EST

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka finds no solace in the bad economic news of late, but it has a silver lining for the powerful labor federation: The downturn has arrived just as the AFL-CIO launches its largest-ever education effort to prod workers to vote their pocketbooks.

“The only bright side to the crisis is that until the housing bubble, the mortgage foreclosure and the stock market crash, we were having difficulty getting people to focus on the economy, even though, everywhere we went, workers told us that it’s killing them,” Trumka said in an interview in his office overlooking Washington’s Lafayette Park.


The federation put together what Trumka calls a “concise economic analysis” that details how three decades’ worth of policies shifted the balance of economic power to corporate employers.
Photo: John Shinkle


“Their wages are stagnating, they’re losing pensions, they’re losing health care” or are facing the threat of losing it, he said. “More people working, working longer hours, more debt that they’re incurring just to keep up with it.”

The AFL-CIO sees this as a “war of ideas,” and, so far, the corporations have succeeded in defining the economic agenda.

So the federation put together what Trumka calls a “concise economic analysis” that details how three decades’ worth of policies shifted the balance of economic power to corporate employers. Then, last August, it launched its “An Economy That Works for All” campaign.

The policies of the corporate agenda have been erected into a “box” around the working class, which, bit by bit, is squeezing the life out of workers and other middle-class Americans, Trumka said.

FULL story at link.