President of AFL-CIO, key player in New Labor Movement
Former President of the United Mine Workers Union
Pled the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination in Teamsters Union money-laundering scandal linked to prominent Democrats
Richard Louis Trumka served as the AFL-CIO's Secretary-Treasurer from 1995 to September 2009, second in command to its President, John Sweeney. On September 16, 2009, Trumka was elected President of the union.
Trumka was born in 1949 in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, the son and grandson of coal miners. He too began working in the mines at age 19, joined the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), served as head of Local 6290's safety committee, and became an activist in the Miners for Democracy reform movement.
Trumka graduated from Pennsylvania State University, earned a degree from Villanova University Law School, and was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar. He served from 1974 until 1978 on the legal staff of UMWA, then returned to the mines. He was elected to UMWA's Executive Board in 1981 and as the union's international President in 1982. He became a member of the AFL-CIO's Executive Council in 1989.
UMWA, founded in 1890 in Ohio, has a long history of radicalism, corruption and violence. When Trumka and UMWA President Cecil Roberts came to Bentleyville, Pennsylvania in April 1998, fifty rank-and-file union members gathered outside the hall where they spoke to protest their leaders' policies. "Within minutes," wrote leftwing journalist Paul Scherrer, "a group of UMWA officials and their supporters attacked the protesting miners, ripping leaflets and protest signs from their hands. Several miners were punched, knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly. [Richard] Cicci was hit with a piece of lumber and suffered a large gash on his head." "Richard Trumka," reported Scherrer, "refused to answer questions about the assault." In other words, by his silence he gave tacit assent to such violence.
On another occasion in 1993, Trumka (whose brief biographies usually mention that he was given an award by the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change) urged striking miners to "kick the s--- out of" employees and businesses resisting UMWA demands.
In 1995 Trumka was one-third of a troika elected to head the AFL-CIO. His running mates for election were Sweeney, head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and Linda Chavez-Thompson, who had been Executive Vice President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). This threesome called itself the "New Voice," and pledged to replace the policies of moderate AFL-CIO leaders.
With government workers now the fastest -- in fact, almost the only -- growing segment of a shrinking organized labor movement, Trumka, Sweeney and Chavez-Thompson represented a turn away from blue-collar industrial unionism and the AFL-CIO's traditional emphasis on raising wages and improving working conditions. That old path had boosted union member wages so high that up to 40 percent of them began voting Republican and complaining about high taxes and big government. The new unionism of Trumka et al, by contrast, focuses on government workers who benefit from higher taxes and bigger government, and who therefore implicitly support socialism and America's pro-big government Democratic Party.
As an AFL-CIO leader, Trumka has developed and promoted radical strategies and tactics like those of the 1960s New Left for signing up workers. These tactics include labor alliances with media, government, and radical activists to intimidate companies by threatening a "death of a thousand cuts" that targets a company's investors, public image, relations with government regulators, and more.
Like his fellow triumvirs, Trumka favors radical approaches to resuscitate a dying labor movement. One of their first projects after winning election was "Union Summer," an effort "to recruit and train hundreds of young people as organizers and political activists."
The agenda of Trumka and his fellow "New Voice" leaders is to promote "class-based organizing." According to labor economist Michael Yates, research shows that "those unions which mobilize rank-and-file workers around a program of aggressive solidarity and conflict with their employers have the best chance of winning union elections, bargaining good contracts, and resisting decertification."
The "Union Summer" indoctrination materials endorsed by Trumka use explicit class warfare rhetoric. Young participants are told to recite a pledge called "Working Class Commitment" that includes the Marxist dogma "that we produce the world's wealth, that we belong to the only class with a future, that our class will end all oppression."
Unlike their more moderate predecessors, Trumka and his fellow AFL-CIO bosses see free market capitalism not as essential to worker prosperity but as something to be despised and destroyed. "Union Summer" seeks to spread ideological hatred of capitalism, as well as love for "progressive" government, throughout the union movement. The ultimate aim is not to boost members' wages, but to radically transform society.
Shortly after coming to power, Trumka, Sweeney and Chavez-Thompson rescinded a founding AFL-CIO rule that banned Communist Party members and loyalists from leadership positions within the Federation and its unions. The "New Voice" triumvirate welcomed Communist Party delegates to positions of power in the Federation. And the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) declared itself "in complete accord" with the troika's new AFL-CIO program. "The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change," wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 about the Trumka/Sweeney/Chavez-Thompson takeover.
One condition of the AFL-CIO merger of 1955 was that outright Communists be purged from CIO unions. The AFL-CIO in 1957 instituted a rule that required any union official invoking his Fifth Amendment right (to avoid incriminating himself before a congressional committee) to be removed from his position. But when Richard Trumka twice invoked his Fifth Amendment right in a case involving a corruption and money-laundering scandal during the late 1990s, the response by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was to purge the rule instead of the rule-breaker Trumka.
This case involved the Teamsters Union, whose President Ron Carey faced likely defeat in his 1996 run for re-election. According to congressional testimony, Carey agreed to raise $1 million for the Democratic National Committee if $100,000 could be provided to him immediately to finance his re-election campaign. In this shell game, as witnesses explained it, the Teamsters Union paid $150,000 to the AFL-CIO, the same amount which its Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka immediately thereafter gave from AFL-CIO accounts to the leftwing political group Citizen Action, which within days provided $100,000 to the Carey campaign.
Among those named by witnesses and investigators as involved in this scheme to illegally fund and influence a union election were Richard Trumka, Ron Carey, Andrew Stern, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, Bill Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, and Clinton-Gore fundraiser Terry McAuliffe.
When the Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Peter Hoekstra started looking into this Teamsters Union scandal, he was asked by the Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Mary Jo White, not to subpoena McAuliffe, Ickes, Trumka and certain others on grounds that their testimony might interfere with a criminal investigation that she and the Clinton Justice Department were already pursuing. But after Hoekstra agreed to White’s request, as he described it, "the entire Teamsters investigation [by White and the Clinton Justice Department] has fallen into a black hole."
Carey's re-election as President of the Teamsters Union was invalidated and he was removed from power. Small players in the case pled guilty. But, despite strong evidence against them, no criminal indictments were ever handed down by White or the Clinton Justice Department against McAuliffe, Ickes or Trumka.
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