Graphic Communicator photo by Susan Zachem

AFL-CIO Secy.-Treas. Richard L. Trumka, flanked by GCIU Secy.-Treas. Gerald H. Deneau, left, and GCIU Pres. James J. Norton, tells GCIU's Coordination of Negotiations Conference delegates of the "woeful inadequacy of the nation's labor laws," adding that U.S. labor laws "are the worst of any industrialized country."

The re-energized labor movement is linking collective bargaining, organizing, political action and workers' capital power to turn back the "unrelenting attack from our enemies" of the past several decades.

That was the message delivered by AFL-CIO Secy.-Treas. Richard L. Trumka to GCIU's Coordination of Negotiations Conference delegates in Pittsburgh.

"I'm really excited about where we are, where we're heading, what we've got done so far, and the progress that we've made," Trumka said. He said that the new leadership of the AFL-CIO is gaining ground on its goal to "convert the labor movement and the leadership of the AFL-CIO from a Washington-based policy institute to a grassroots organization that is a lean, mean fighting machine."

Trumka said the need for union action isn't lessened just because the overall economy is seen as strong with low inflation and low unemployment. "We have an economy that's really like . . . the good, the bad and the ugly," he said. "There's the good: if you're at the top of the heap, you're doing real well. There's the bad: if you're at the bottom of the heap, you're doing very poorly. And if you're in the middle, you're like a lot of us, and you're looking out into the future and you say 'that could be ugly.'"

There are many sectors of the economy "that are getting hit and hit hard and the potential for others of us that haven't quite got hit yet to be hit," Trumka said. He cited the manufacturing sector which lost 285,000 jobs last year, with a good part of those in the steel and auto industries.

A lot of the job loss, Trumka said, can be attributed to bad trade policies. The U.S. trade deficit in goods set a record last year at $240 billion. This year, it's projected to hit $300 billion. Noting that for every $1 billion in trade deficit, 25,000 jobs are lost, Trumka said $300 billion translates into "about 7.5 million jobs that could be created if all of those products we have brought in were plunked down in front of us and made here."

But another major problem is the tremendous flight of jobs offshore, Trumka said. He cited the example of Levi-Strauss, the maker of the "hallmark" American product of jeans. The company announced it would close 12 plants and send 6,000 jobs offshore and that in 10 years not a single pair of jeans will be made in the United States.

No one is insulated from this trend, Trumka said. In the service sector, for example, AT&T just moved a billing operation to Thailand that will use electronic data transmission to move the information back to the United States. "The technology that's out there in your industry could be impacted by all of this," he noted.

The trade deficit and the removal of jobs to lower-wage countries is not abstract – it pushes labor standards down in the United States, Trumka said. "That's what we're looking at. We're having more people without health care and pensions are under assault," he said.

Even Social Security, the time-proven safety net that has "lifted more people out of poverty than any other program," is under attack from those who want to turn it into a program of private retirement investment accounts, Trumka said. Every privatization scheme floated so far involves raising the age of retirement and cutting the level of benefits, he said.

"The thing that frustrates me the most is that we have the strongest economy at the strongest point in its history and we're talking about raising the age of retirement," Trumka said. "It seems to me that our nation . . . ought to be figuring out a way to lower the retirement age, not raise the retirement age."

The response to these continuing efforts to push workers down instead of raise them up, Trumka said, requires unions "to link organizing, political action, collective bargaining and capital strategies together in a single coherent strategy if we're going to win."

On political action, Trumka said, the AFL-CIO started to change the way unions did things when it developed an "air war" of advertising on issues during the 1996 elections. In 1998, the federation combined the air war with a "ground war" involving grassroots campaigns to educate, mobilize, and bring people together. The result, he said, "created history. . . . This is the first time in history that a party that held the White House in an off-year election didn't lose seats."

For the 2000 elections, Trumka said, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates recently voted to put together a $46 million "war chest to mobilize people." Full-time coordinators will operate in 40 to 60 congressional districts to work on issue education and voter registration campaigns. He said the federation is asking every union to name a coordinator in those areas to link with the AFL-CIO coordinator. "When election time comes, we'll have that network in place to be able to get people out there and vote," he said.

"We need your help," Trumka said. "We need you to understand that political action ties directly into collective bargaining; that the climate that exists in the country is a direct function of political action as well as collective bargaining. You can't separate them out."

Another link, Trumka said, is the "woeful inadequacy of the nation's labor laws." Elected officials make the laws that impact bargaining and organizing and appoint members of the National Labor Relations Board, courts and other bodies that impact labor laws.

"I don't have to tell you that our [labor] laws are the worst of any industrialized country," Trumka said. "And I don't have to tell you that we aren't going to change them by wishing and hoping. We're going to change them by electing friends of working people to the House and to the Senate and to the statehouses so that there's a different climate out there."

Trumka said that organizing "can't be a hobby for the labor movement." Under the federation's organizing program, all affiliates and local unions are urged to put at least 30 percent of their resources into organizing. Since about 78 percent of all union resources are held by locals, he said: "If the locals don't buy into organizing, we're not going to get it done."

"If we don't organize, if we don't grow," Trumka warned, and employers and business groups will "try to make us more and more irrelevant and less effective in political action because we have less members to turn out and less members to help us get people to the polls."

Collective bargaining also ties into organizing and capital strategies, Trumka said. Bargaining for such things as neutrality, accretion and card-check clauses with employers operating multiple worksites makes organizing those existing and new plants easier, he noted.

And bargaining for pension investment control strengthens worker power on Wall Street, Trumka said. Workers have about $6 trillion in retirement assets – including pensions, stock plans and 401(k) plans – yet many workers who participate in these plans have no voice on the boards that govern them and make investment decisions. Union pension funds alone control some $350 billion in assets.

"We own 26 percent of corporate America and they treat us like chumps," Trumka said. "Not only don't they use that money to help us; they use that money to cut our throats." He said worker pension money is used to finance downsizing, outsourcing, and the relocation of plants overseas. "And us, like saps, have been allowing it to happen over the years," he said.

The AFL-CIO's capital strategies program evolved from the realization that unions are the largest voting bloc on Wall Street, Trumka said. A survey found that 43 percent of all shareholder resolutions last year dealing with the way corporations are run were introduced by labor unions.

Aspects of the capital strategies program cited by Trumka included:

• Helping affiliates negotiate with employers to use worker pension money to invest in long-term, job-creating ventures, such as new plants, in return for guarantees that they will be union-built and union-run.

• Helping affiliates negotiate more representative power as union pension trustees and forcing other trustees to consider job-creating investments. "None of this has to be at a lower rate of return," Trumka stressed.

• A new course at the George Meany Center for Labor Studies that teaches union pension trustees about investment issues.

• A court challenge to make shareholder resolutions binding on corporate boards.

• Persuading the Securities and Exchange Commission to accept shareholder resolutions dealing with employee relations.

• A new AFL-CIO report, which is available from the International, that grades investment firms based on their votes on union-sponsored shareholder resolutions. The report found that 39 out of 103 firms representing union pension funds cast votes more than half the time against union-sponsored corporate accountability resolutions.

• A study in progress that will evaluate investment funds that claim to be "worker friendly."

All of these new strategies will take grassroots solidarity and hard work to make them successful, Trumka said. He urged local leaders to "educate your membership and let them know the importance of these issues to . . . their future, to maintaining their standard of living and building on their standard of living."