AFL-CIO's Trumka speaks on Mayday, says nothing

Trumka with Daley and Obama having a good laugh on us

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka spoke in Wisconsin on Mayday but didn’t say anything concrete, just lots of feel good phrases.

"No!" to corporate-backed politicians trying to turn us into a low-wage, no-rights workforce as payback to their CEO friends.”, he said which is a little odd as the AFL-CIO supports corporate backed politicians and Trumka's having a good laugh with two of them in the image above.  Barack Obama himself received huge sums of money from the corporations and Daley is from the corrupt Chicago Daley machine.

“We're saying "No!" to the Scott Walkers, "you cannot take basic rights and jobs away from teachers, firefighters and police officers—the people we rely on to make our communities safe and worth living in." Trumka went on.  “We're saying "No!" to the Jim Sensenbrenners, "you cannot force police officers to harass someone on the street simply because of how he or she looks."

No sensible person could disagree with this stuff but Trumka said nothing concrete about wages or working conditions, vacation time or jobs and how we can win such things. How silly of me, I forgot that as far as wages, working conditions, more leisure time, vacations, are concerned, Trumka, like all of his colleagues atop the AFL-CIO have already agreed to hand over to the bosses what we have and not fight for what we want.

Trumka did contribute a few “fairly tale” sentences:

“And what is this America we want? “ he says, then proceeds to answer his own question:

“It's a land of equal opportunity, a land of fairness in the workplace and society.
It's a land where we all—every one of us—have the right to come together in unions and bargain for a better life. A land where we can join together to turn jobs into good jobs, with wages we can raise families on and health care we can count on, and where every job is a safe job.
A land where the DREAM Act enables all of our children to reach their aspirations.”

Well there is the strategy. The “DREAM ACT”.  He must be dreaming.  What a pathetic contribution on Mayday, a day that celebrates the independent struggle of US workers for an eight-hour day. Obama was the best thing since sliced bread and before that, Clinton. We got NAFTA under Clinton and Obama stuck it to them on EFCA. In case you’ve forgotten, EFCA was the Employee Free Choice Act that the Labor bureaucracy hung their hat on after giving Obama and the Democrats a few hundred million dollars of their members hard earned money.

If they can't get EFCA which would have made it easier for them to get more revenue in the form of dues money without doing any real work for it, how can they expect to get this dream of theirs, this Pollyanna equality.?

When Trumka and Sweeney were running for the leadership of the AFL-CIO in the mid nineties, it was the first contested election in a century. The moribund Kirkland was on his way out and they defeated Donahue, Kirkland’s favored successor.

Prior to the election, Richard Trumka said on October 26th 1995,
“While we are always willing to negotiate as equals, the era of union busting, contract trashing and strike breaking is at an end. Today, we say that when you pick a fight with any of us, you pick a fight with all of us! And that when you push us, we will push back."

So much for that.