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Trumka: Union Movement Must Reach Out More to People of Color |
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The election of Barack Obama is just the beginning of a new revolution to create the kind of America that provides a decent living, dignity and respect for all.
Speaking to the Labor Luncheon at the NAACP’s centennial national convention in New York City yesterday, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka said:
If we don’t seize this incredible moment, we may not get another chance and our grandchildren will never forgive us. Because you and I know that, as tremendous a victory as Barack Obama’s election was, we can’t let it be an achievement to rest on.
It was a milestone, but it wasn’t the finish line.
Trumka pointed out that African Americans are suffering disproportionately from the economic crisis and that the sluggish recovery threatens to wipe out the gains by black workers in the past decade.
People talk about a middle-class squeeze. Well, the African American middle class isn’t being squeezed; it’s being crushed!
Though the media doesn’t report it, we all know that African American poverty was on the rise years before anyone thought there’d be a recession.
Making the economy work for everyone—a mutual goal of the AFL-CIO and the NAACP—requires electing more leaders who have the guts to take on the tough issues of inequality, health care and workplace fairness, Trumka said.
At the same time, though, we have to take these same issues to the bargaining table, he said, “because we can’t win justice in the community unless there’s justice on the job.”
That’s why the NAACP’s support of the Employee Free Choice Act is so important, Trumka said. He told the audience the right to join a union is a civil rights issue.
Brave men and women didn’t risk their lives in Selma and Birmingham and Memphis so companies…could rob workers…of the right to organize.
After the Employee Free Choice Act becomes law, Trumka said, the real work will begin to organize workers who have been left behind. The union movement has not reached out enough to workers of color over the years, Trumka said, but while “we can’t change the sins of the past,” we can learn from them and build a new kind of labor movement for the future.
Together, we have a vision of a different kind of an America than the one we have today.
We see an America where all of us are able to take our place in the winner’s circle.
That’s the American future we dream of—and together that’s the American future we’re going to win.
Also at the convention, which wraps up today with a speech by President Obama, Labor Arts launched a new exhibit celebrating the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, which began publishing in 1910.
The exhibit, “Labor in Crisis: Memory, Art and Race, 1911-1929,” highlights numerous drawings, political cartoons, photographs and prints. The images were designed to help change the minds of people with respect to race, with the visuals generated from a black perspective. For more information on the exhibit, click here.
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