Top officials from the AFL-CIO, in addition to voicing their support of the U.S. maritime industry, urged MTD unions to pour their resources into organizing and political action.Federation President John Sweeney and Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka also told the MTD executive board that solidarity will remain fundamental to progress within the labor movement.
"Our organizing figures are up but our membership figures are down," Sweeney said. "We organized more members last year than we did the year before. Many unions are showing net membership increases, even at a time when unemployment is so high. Unfortunately, the AFL-CIO had a net loss of some 73,000 members last year. That net loss came about because our big manufacturing unions continue to lose members because of our disastrous trade policies, our lack of any sort of industrial policies and the rotten economy which has also hit the retail and hospitality sectors very hard."
Sweeney noted that a number of AFL-CIO affiliates recently formed an industrial union council that aims to boost organizing and "stop this hemorrhaging (of jobs), especially in the industrial sector. We're also revving up a more comprehensive Voice at Work campaign to expose the immoral and illegal tactics employers are using to thwart union drives and destroy the hopes of workers. I know many of the unions in this room support our efforts because of the efforts you are taking to organize mariners in the Gulf Coast region as one example."
He added, "If we can stand against brutality and tyranny in foreign countries then we can also stand against tyranny in our own workplaces. The freedom to form a union is a sacred right. And working together, we will demand that it be honored and protected.
"Our goal is to build a public outcry against employers that violate the spirit as well as the letter of our labor laws and build majority support in Congress [for] labor law reform."
Trumka asked the MTD affiliates to examine their respective organizing and political programs and identify what works and what needs improvement. He said that, because of the sizeable challenges facing America's working families, unions must maximize their resources.
"As brothers and sisters, the onslaught that faces us and the challenge that faces us and the threat that faces us is every bit as great today as it was following the Great Depression, if not more so," Trumka said, "because our enemies are more powerful. They are more sophisticated and they are more determined to rub us out because we are the last line of defense that [won't let] them take the field unabated, uncontrolled. Today, more than ever, we need solidarity, we need to be together, we need to act in unison, we need to prevent anybody and everybody from trying to peel us apart one by one for their own advantages."
He stated that workers and their unions also must succeed in their efforts to ensure corporate responsibility and fair treatment from legislators. "We have to change the way business is done, on Wall Street and in Washington. We've already seen the results of "business as usual" when it comes to the tremendous loss of jobs in our industrial sector, and what it's done to the membership of our industrial unions. Nothing could be more important than reversing that trend."
Underscoring some of the problems, Trumka told the audience about his 83-year-old mother, who "lives on Social Security and one half of my dad's Mine Worker's pension. She doesn't end up at the end of the year with a lot of money. Yet, my mother paid more taxes last year than 53 percent of the corporations in America. My mother paid more taxes than many of the Fortune 500 companies. Is that not disgraceful? Isn't this a system that has stood on its head?"
Citing another regrettable example, Trumka noted that Bethlehem Steel recently "moved to renege on pension and health retiree benefits for 95,000 retirees. Think about that: 95,000 people who did everything that was asked from them. They worked hard. They produced millions, billions of dollars in profit and they were given two promises - you get a pension and you get health care. Well, Bethlehem reneged on both of those. That demonstrates that we have more to worry about than just the wholesale changes from defined benefit to defined contribution, pension plans and the stock market damage to 401Ks."
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