Afl Cio

A "super PAC" created by an influential labor organization will focus its efforts on motivating voters on the ground, rather than financing television commercials. "It's not going to be about FEC deadlines, television ads or the usual super PAC activity. It's about building a new way for workers to connect,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer for the AFL-CIO, at a news conference Thursday morning detailing the super PAC's strategy. Unlike past union efforts, the Workers Voices super PAC will be able to reach out to all workers, including nonunion ones.

WASHINGTON - Well aware that unions played a prominent role in supporting the incumbent's effective ground game, the AFL-CIO celebrated President Obama's reelection, though its leadership was keen to emphasize that its fight isn't over. “Working people all across the country are waking up today with a renewed sense of faith in our future,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said at the beginning of a news conference Wednesday. “Last night, you saw what our nation is - Latinos, young people, African Americans, union families, a very vibrant multiracial, multi-ethnic, multigenerational country whose electorate and leaders are slowly becoming more representative of who we are,” he said.

Success and access to the halls of power haven't robbed the passion from Richard L. Trumka, a third-generation mine worker who rose to the pinnacle of the U.S. labor movement. "The middle class is under assault right now, nearly extinct," Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said Thursday during his first official visit to Los Angeles since taking the helm of the federation last year. "We have the very rich and we have the rest of us." He laments what he views as the erosion of the U.S. social democracy since the mid-1970s.

Joyce D. Miller, who rose from an assembly line job to the top ranks of American labor as the first woman on the AFL-CIO executive council, died June 30 in Washington. She was 84. The cause was a stroke, said her daughter, Rebecca Miller. Miller was an advocate for women in the workplace for more than three decades. A divorced mother of three, she worked her way up to leadership positions in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America during the 1960s and '70s. As the women's movement gathered strength, she helped found the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974 and became its president in 1977.

The AFL-CIO adopted a strong resolution Tuesday supporting the Central American peace plan of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. The resolution was adopted by voice vote without dissent by the 726 delegates to the labor group's biennial convention here and was part of a lengthy measure on foreign affairs issues.

He came to power as an insurgent vowing to shake up the stodgy House of Labor that was the AFL-CIO. Fourteen years later, John J. Sweeney, an immigrants' son who rose to the pinnacle of U.S. unionism, is stepping down this month as president of the AFL-CIO. The labor movement remains deeply divided, its ranks greatly thinned, its top legislative goals unrealized and unemployment nearing 10%, the highest in more than a quarter of a century. Yet Sweeney, 75, departs as organized labor faces its best prospects in years.

Despite some recent organizing and legislative successes, membership in the AFL-CIO has continued to fall in the last two years, according to a report issued by the federation on the eve of its biennial convention. The 89 unions in the AFL-CIO lost 407,000 members, a decline of 3.1%, in the last two years. This brought the federation's total membership to 12.7 million, the lowest it has been since 1963.

Organized labor took some small, but potentially significant, steps at its convention here last week toward creating a "new New Deal" for America's workers in the post-Reagan years. Over time, these little-noticed moves could prove to be even more important than the headline event of the week--the AFL-CIO's decision to readmit the controversial Teamsters Union after a 30-year exile. The actions were both substantive and symbolic.

The Teamsters' brewery division chief said his union will sue if the management of Adolph Coors Co. gives the rival AFL-CIO an organizing advantage among brewery employees in Colorado. Charles Klare said at a Washington news conference that Coors management prefers dealing with a weaker AFL-CIO union over the Teamsters, which he said represents more than 100,000 brewery workers nationwide.

Throughout Ronald Reagan's tenure in the White House, the leaders of organized labor have gone to their annual meeting here facing unmitigated disaster. The crushing of the air traffic controllers' strike in 1981 was followed by hostile rulings from the National Labor Relations Board and a steady decline in union ranks. They adjourned this year's meeting Friday, however, in the most upbeat mood in several years.

A "super PAC" created by an influential labor organization will focus its efforts on motivating voters on the ground, rather than financing television commercials. "It's not going to be about FEC deadlines, television ads or the usual super PAC activity. It's about building a new way for workers to connect,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer for the AFL-CIO, at a news conference Thursday morning detailing the super PAC's strategy. Unlike past union efforts, the Workers Voices super PAC will be able to reach out to all workers, including nonunion ones.

Leaders of the influential AFL-CIO  labor federation announced Tuesday it voted "proudly and enthusiastically" to endorse President Obama's reelection effort.   "We feel that he's put forth bold initiatives and put people back to work, put revenues back in the country, put out a vision that expresses opportunity and fairness," said Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "We think he's a good man. " The council spoke to Obama by telephone during its closed-door session, in which the president sounded "very engaged, very knowledgeable," according to McEntee, who serves as chair of the AFL-CIO's political education committee.

As top union leaders gather in Florida on Tuesday to determine labor's political strategy this year, the influential AFL-CIO appears poised to endorse President Obama's reelection - despite some lingering dissatisfaction with his record. But the way in which unions back him and other Democrats this year is likely to take a very different form than in past campaigns. Concluding they need to be more independent of the Democratic Party, many unions are increasingly financing their own efforts instead of writing large checks to candidates and the party.

Now that seven American pro-democracy workers have been allowed to post bail and return to the United States, perhaps we can examine what the U.S. was up to in Egypt using reason instead of patriotic emotion. The Egyptian furor over such seemingly idealistic work may strike us as wild and idiotic, but in fact, the Egyptians have a right to be suspicious. America's attempt to promote democracy around the world through private organizations has unsavory beginnings and a sometimes troubling history.

Union membership is on the wane, but not at the Vermont Carwash and Nava's Carwash in South Los Angeles. The two businesses have agreed to collective bargaining agreements with their workers, who are members of the United Steelworkers union. Wages at the firms will be $8.16 an hour, organizers said, an increase of about 2%. There are now believed to be three union carwashes in the country, with Santa Monica's Bonus Carwash becoming the first last year. But if union leaders are able to stem — let alone reverse — years of declining membership, it will take the allegiance of these kinds of low-wage workers.

The future of the labor movement may very well rest in the hands of a man who was sitting over a paper plate piled with spaghetti, amusing his audience by twirling a napkin in his ear, then hamming it up with a wink and a goofy grin that would make any teenager cringe. He'd been working for 12 hours already, but AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka had every reason to be giddy. Ohioans had just voted down a law that restricted collective bargaining for public workers, and the American labor movement was savoring a rare victory.

The AFL-CIO is set to be the newest arrival on the burgeoning “super PAC” scene. The labor group plans to form an independent expenditure committee to bolster its year-round political operations, the Associated Press reported Monday.  The committee will be able to accept unlimited contributions from union members and outside supporters but will not be allowed to make contributions directly to candidates. "The essential idea is that changes in the law for the first time really allow the labor movement to speak directly to workers, whether they have collective bargaining agreements or not," AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer told the AP. "Before, most political resources went to our own membership.

Leaders of the influential AFL-CIO  labor federation announced Tuesday it voted "proudly and enthusiastically" to endorse President Obama's reelection effort.   "We feel that he's put forth bold initiatives and put people back to work, put revenues back in the country, put out a vision that expresses opportunity and fairness," said Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. "We think he's a good man. " The council spoke to Obama by telephone during its closed-door session, in which the president sounded "very engaged, very knowledgeable," according to McEntee, who serves as chair of the AFL-CIO's political education committee.

Murray Seeger, a Los Angeles Times foreign correspondant who served as Moscow bureau chief in the early 1970s and was later director of information for the AFL-CIO, has died. He was 82. Seeger, who lived in Silver Spring, Md., died of pneumonia Monday in a hospital in Olney, Md., said his son, Stephen M. Seeger. After entering journalism in the early 1950s, Seeger was covering economics, labor, banking, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and regulatory agencies for Newsweek magazine in Washington, D.C., when Los Angeles Times editors recruited him in 1967 to create a similar beat.

The AFL-CIO is set to be the newest arrival on the burgeoning “super PAC” scene. The labor group plans to form an independent expenditure committee to bolster its year-round political operations, the Associated Press reported Monday.  The committee will be able to accept unlimited contributions from union members and outside supporters but will not be allowed to make contributions directly to candidates. "The essential idea is that changes in the law for the first time really allow the labor movement to speak directly to workers, whether they have collective bargaining agreements or not," AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer told the AP. "Before, most political resources went to our own membership.