How I Met Your Brother
In a bold and surprising move to expand union brotherhood, Richard Trumka, president of the 11.5-million member AFL-CIO, announced that his Federation would consider inviting non-union workers to join up. And in an equally surprising move, Trumka also suggested inviting progressive environmental and civil rights groups (e.g., the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, etc.) to form partnerships or quasi-coalitions with the House of Labor.
This announcement was made on the eve of the AFL-CIO’s convention, which began on Sunday, September 8, in Los Angeles. Although Trumka and his advisors deserve enormous credit for pursuing ideological alliances that fall well beyond conventional, boilerplate unionism, jurisdictional concerns and questions about the nuts and bolts of implementation are certain to arise. Still, this is a wonderfully unorthodox concept.
It should also be noted that, if this wildly ambitious undertaking has any chance of succeeding, there’s going to be a boatload of bad history that needs to be addressed before anything gets done—not only with the environmentalists, but with the pro-immigration movement as well.
Because unions have always been about economics, they’ve pretty much been in favor of leveling hills, draining lakes, felling trees, drilling oil, mining ore, and pouring cement wherever, whenever, and however possible. After all, labor’s stock in trade is jobs, jobs, and more jobs. Let the environmentalists