Will 2012 Become Labor’s Moment of Political Truth?
Protest inside Wisconsin State Capitol building this winter. Photo: Creative Commons/mrbula
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, well, Richard Trumka is no fool. The president of the largest labor federation in the country—the AFL-CIO boasts of 11 million members—had scathing words for Democrats and President Obama at a speech last week at the National Press Club.
“If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, working people will not support them. This is where our focus will be—now, in 2012, and beyond,” Trumka said.
The speech built upon a theme Trumka has been developing for months: Don’t count on labor to blindly support Democrats who aren’t supporting labor. “It’s actually going to be fun,” he told Salon’s Joan Walsh a few weeks ago, speaking of the union’s plan to give “less to party structure, and more to our own structure.” He repeated the point last week. “Our role is not to build the power of a political party or a candidate,” he said. Ouch.
AFL-CIO isn’t the first union to publicly distance itself from Democrats’ electoral fate; the firefighters union declared in April that it would freeze its federal political spending in 2012 and direct money to local campaigns instead. But the support of AFL-CIO is of another scale, both financially and politically. Trumka’s much
