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Trumka to Law Students: We Need Your Help to Fight for Workers |
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At a national law students’ conference presented by the Peggy Browning Fund, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the nation’s next generation of labor lawyers justice for workers can’t be won unless there are lawyers willing to fight on their behalf:
You’re choosing to follow your conscience, to pursue economic justice and not just to fatten your wallets. There is no higher calling than the one you aspire to—to pursue social and economic justice in our nation, to ensure that we are a nation of equal opportunity.
America’s unions are as vital today as ever in our history, and we need young legal minds like yours to help us spread the word, to make our case. So I invite you to join us, to dedicate your careers to encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.
Trumka laid out a vision for the future of the labor movement—one that fights to advocate strongly for social and economic justice for everyone. Trumka pledged to make sure all workers have the freedom to form a union, through effective organizing efforts and the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act to reform our broken labor laws. He also pledged to listen closely to the voices of young people and to engage them so that we can build a union movement that stays relevant for generations to come.
Trumka, who received his law degree from Villanova University, praised the late Peggy Browning, a labor lawyer and member of the National Labor Relations Board, and encouraged students to follow in her footsteps. A lawyer fighting on behalf of workers can make a real difference in peoples’ lives, Trumka said, citing his own experiences during the 1989 Pittston strike, when the Mine Workers (UMWA) protected their health benefits and won a fair contract in the face of fierce opposition from both the mine owners and the owners’ allies in local courts.
Students took part in a question-and-answer session at the Saturday event with Trumka, who got a chance to hear their perspectives on the challenges facing the next generation of workers.
2 Comments
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Most excellent, educating folks on real labor realities. Long overdue.
Organized labor needs to mount a massive reeducatiion effort for the public. Have you ever seen the text books on history in Missouri?
I looked at several and the point of the texts seems to be that unions are outmoted, outdated and basically useless. Strikes are covered mostly from the “industrialist” points of view. Also mentioned is union thugs, not that company thugs exist. Maybe a score of pages devoted to working folks history in America.
I suspect other text books used in other states are basically a little less than fair to unions and working folks history.
I couldn’t agree more. The history of labor and the struggle of working people is completely missing from the conventional story arc of the US. And with union density so low, there are fewer people to keep that history alive and make it relevant to kids (and the general public) today. I talk to people all the time that essentially agree with tenets of unionism but don’t like “unions”. All they know about is the corruption and mafia connections, or some anecdotal negative experience with a specific union. Anymore, I tend to talk about “collective action” and “collective bargaining” and leave out the word “union”. But even then, it can be a chore to convince people that all the things about work they take for granted (min wage, the weekend, sick leave, company health insurance, the 8-hr day, 40-hr workweek, and on and on) were brought about by workers demanding them from their employers, and that they are being eroded every day because we aren’t fighting back. Most people have been lulled into thinking that the business class just gives those things away for the betterment of humankind. Crumbs just fall out of the pockets of the rich for all of us to feed happily on.