Holt Baker, Shuler: Diversity Critical to Future of Workers and Unions

by Seth Michaels, Sep 13, 2009

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker says it’s the responsibility of everyone in the union movement to help advance new leaders and get the voices of women and minorities involved in making decisions.

To build a strong, fairly treated workforce and a sustainable union movement, we need to reach out and focus on diversity. That was the message of AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer candidate Liz Shuler to the hundreds of participants at today’s Diversity Summit.

Holt Baker said she was inspired by the people in the room who were making substantive, positive changes at the local level, the national level and in their communities to help lift up those who had been too often left behind in our nation’s history. But although the AFL-CIO and its unions have made gains in diversity and equal opportunity, there is still a long way to go, she said.

Recognize that while our early building blocks established a firm foundation, and that bricks and mortar are going into place regularly and with some scope, we still have a long way to go.

Holt Baker recalled the process that brought the Diversity Summit into existence, as well as bringing AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Emerita Linda Chavez-Thompson into the leadership of the AFL-CIO. The process of adding new voices and evaluating and improving diversity at all levels worked to the benefit of the entire union movement, she said:

It immediately opened up not only our leadership, but it sunshined our policy-making process, and it has made us a better organization and a more dynamic movement.

Shuler, who serves as executive assistant to Ed Hill, president of the Electrical Workers (IBEW), said that it’s the responsibility of everyone in the union movement to help advance new leaders and get the voices of women and minorities involved in making decisions. Drawing on her own experience of organizing women with the IBEW, Shuler said:

What the Federation does is crucial.  But what each of us does in our unions is equally important. In my case, I was able to overcome hurdles because those who ranked above me—men and women alike—reached back and helped me up the ladders they had climbed.

Because, still, far too many women, people of color and gay Americans’ opportunities in life are being doubly jeopardized by a lousy economy and the long-standing prejudices of employers—and unfortunately, of some members.

So it’s up to those of us who’ve experienced new opportunities because of our unions and those of us deeply committed to diversifying our workplaces and our membership to ensure that the progress we’ve made so far is just a start.

We need a new commitment to look forward and to address the needs of an increasingly diverse, increasingly struggling population of young people, Shuler said. Reaching out to and protecting those young workers is critical to their future, but it’s just as critical to the union movement’s future:

I come before this convention as an example of the possibility for progress on diversity that the Labor Movement can provide.

And I will go forward from this summit carrying the message of diversity’s importance to a new generation of workers.

They—more than any generation before them, as far as I can tell—will welcome our commitment to diversity as evidence that our values have much in common with theirs.

Holt Baker and Shuler represent the voice of a union movement seeking to ensure that all voices are heard, especially those that had been left out in the past.

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