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Trumka to UMWA: Keep Fighting |
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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka traveled to West Virginia yesterday to celebrate a new term for Mine Workers (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts and Secretary-Treasurer Daniel Kane and to recognize the contributions of the union where he got his start.
Trumka talked about the crippling effects of the economic crisis and the need for a strong, energetic union movement to turn it around not just for individual workers and their families, but for the whole country.
Reaching back through the long history of the UMWA and the union movement, Trumka said the power of workers, uniting together, helped pull the country out of the 1930s Depression. With unemployment at a 26-year high and housing and health care increasingly hard for families to afford, we need that spirit now, Trumka said:
There’s only one way working people have ever won in the past; and only one way we ever will win in the future. And, sisters and brothers, it’s not by begging for it. It’s not by pleading for it. And it’s not even by praying for it. It’s by standing up and fighting for it.
It’s knowing that the only guarantee any of us will ever have of a better life is the power that can only come with a union contract!
That means fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act, Trumka said, and organizing across the country when it’s signed into law.
Trumka said that Roberts and the UMWA have always stood for the vital principles of the movement:
The true measure of any union’s strength isn’t the quality of its officers, but the solidarity of its members. And that good contracts may be written by the leaders sitting at the bargaining table, but they’re won by the workers who sent them there: Workers who understand that the only time people like us ever get ahead is when we turn to each other, not on each other. And if you fight, you may not always win; but if you run from a fight you’re certain to lose.
Brothers and sisters, that’s what the UMWA has always been about, and I’m here to tell you that what the American labor movement is about, too.
Trumka and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker thanked Roberts, Kane and the UMWA for their efforts during this critical time for our country’s workers.
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Mr. Trumka and the AFL-CIO has focused on EFCA and the failed trade union organizing strategy of the last 30 years. This simplistic strategy is an inadequate response to the many crises that working people face today. The corrupt capitalist economy is no long capable of supplying decent jobs to millions of now desperate working people.
Here are article and video links to the crises faced by working people in Detroit and nationwide.
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50,000 line up for housing aid in Detroit
By Jerry White
8 October 2009
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/lead-o08.shtml
An estimated 50,000 residents of Detroit filed into Cobo Hall convention center on Wednesday seeking assistance to pay utility bills and keep from being evicted from their homes. City officials, who expected around 3,000 people to apply for the aid, were overwhelmed by the turnout.
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Detroit residents line up for housing assistance
“Most people out here have been unemployed for months”
By Andre Damon
8 October 2009
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/detr-o08.shtml
Tens of thousands of people waited for hours Wednesday in downtown Detroit to get applications for housing assistance. The turnout overwhelmed the event’s planners, who thought no more than several thousand people would attend. Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke to people attending the event at Cobo Hall.
“I was waiting in line for hours before I learned that this program is not for people from my neighborhood,” said Jackie Hall, a resident of Harper Woods, a nearby city.
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Video: Tens of thousands line up for housing assistance in Detroit
8 October 2009
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/vide-o08.shtml
Tens of thousands of Detroit residents lined up at the city’s Cobo complex for a chance to get financial assistance against evictions and utility shutoffs. This was the last day to submit applications for a share of the limited funds made available by the federal government for this purpose. The city was overwhelmed by the number of needy Detroiters who showed up to apply for the program.
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Brother Trumka went into the coal fields talking tough but when it comes down to putting words into action all he knows and has done is what any lawyer knows and does - TALK. As long as the labor movement and the working class is tied to the twin parties of capital and does nothing more then beg and plead for a few crumbs we won’t get a damn thing - as Trumka claims to understand. We got things by fighting for them and putting workers in the street costing the bosses in the only place that hurts them - their wallets.
Captilism is broke and in debt that our great-great grandchildren will not be able to repay. Should we continue to support a system that has such a future? HELL NO! But Trumka and the bureaucrats he speaks for want us tied to the Democrats and the capitalist system because that assures them of a few silver coins from the bosses table.
I love Richard Trumka,
God Bless him, his Father and his Grandfather.
Long live the UMWA.
To the folks issuing the criticisms, what have you done to help our workers? If you really believe what you said about President Trumka, then you don’t know him at all!