AFL-CIO Wants to Fix Labor's Image
By Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers
Richard Trumka, expected to be elected head of the AFL-CIO later this week, knows labor has an image problem. And he's ready to take it on. "Our goal," he says, "is to try to begin to speak again for all workers." Already, he's planning to reach out to blacks, young workers, and the working poor. He blames the media in part for the bad image, suggesting that editors cut or trash broader stories on the labor movement.
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Reader Comments
Unions - Good For American Families
It's no accident that the decline in unions over the last 30 years has coincided with the decline of the middle class. I hope unions make a comeback, and soon. If workers run their union democratically, they can do a great job representing the economic interests of their members. Unions are about using collective bargaining to gain better wages, benefits and retirement, things that all "free" men deserve. I don't like being expendable. I don't like worrying that I might have to work until the day I die and/or that I'll die young and poor. I trust unions more than I trust Wall Street and I will be supporting pro-union candidates in future elections.
It wasn't true in the past (last century)
but the most entrenched unions today are the public-employee unions. And there is no sign they going away---since everybody who works in the public sector knows how capricious the mid-level supervisors of government enterprises can become. You want to teach for some school-board-pressured principal with no union? Not if you have a modicum of wits. You want to be a cop for some city-council-pressured chief with no union? Same answer.
As for the first comment below that unions drove the jobs out of America----I'd invite you to consider whether it was more likely the greed magnet of high-end tax cuts that evaporated your jobs. After all, an empirical case could be made that the less the private-sector work force was unionized in recent years, the FASTER the jobs have disappeared. But those tax cuts that were sold to you for job "creation"? Well, you still have ALL of them---and what's your result?
Good luck with that...
That is all.
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