Richard L. Trumka

Richard L. Trumka was elected AFL-CIO president in September 2009. He served as AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer since 1995. Born in Nemacolin, Pa., on July 24, 1949, Trumka was elected to the AFL-CIO Executive Council in 1989. At the time of his election to the secretary-treasurer post, he was serving his third term as president of the Mine Workers (UMWA). At the UMWA, Trumka led two major strikes against the Pittston Coal Co. and the Bituminous Coal Operators Association. The actions resulted in significant advances in employee-employer cooperation and the enhancement of mine workers’ job security, pensions and benefits.

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Liz Shuler

Liz Shuler was elected AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer in September 2009, the youngest person ever to become an officer of the AFL-CIO. Shuler previously was the highest-ranking woman in the Electrical Workers (IBEW) union, serving as the top assistant to the IBEW president since 2004. In 1993, she joined IBEW Local 125 in Portland, Ore., where she worked as an organizer and state legislative and political director. In 1998, she was part of the IBEW’s international staff in Washington, D.C., as a legislative and political representative.

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Arlene Holt Baker

Arlene Holt Baker’s experience as a union and grassroots organizer spans more than 30 years. On Sept. 21, 2007, she was approved unanimously as executive vice president by the AFL-CIO Executive Council, becoming the first African American to be elected to one of the federation’s three highest offices and the highest-ranking African American woman in the union movement. In this position, Holt Baker builds on her legacy of inspiring activism and reaching out to diverse communities to support the needs and aspirations of working people.

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Contact Arlene Holt Baker at: blognews@aflcio.org

Tula Connell

I got my first union card while I worked my way through college as a banquet bartender for the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee (we were represented by a hotel and restaurant local union—the names of the national unions were different then than they are now). With a background in journalism—covering bull roping in Texas and school boards in Virginia—I started working in the labor movement in 1991. Beginning as a writer for SEIU (and OPEIU member), I now blog under the title of AFL-CIO managing editor.

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aflcioblogger

By definition, I’m anonymous.

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Belinda Boyce

Before joining the AFL-CIO Collective Bargaining Department as research analyst, I worked for six years in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department: three years in Voice@Work and three years in the Center for Strategic Research, working on organizing, issue, and political campaigns. I attended Penn State University, where I became a rabid fan of Nittany Lion football, and later graduated from Florida State University College of Law.

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Laura Clawson

My parents had me out on picket lines too long ago for me to clearly remember, and I participated in the first AFL-CIO Union Summer, but in the end, I came to my current position as senior writer for Working America through online politics. While doing a Ph.D. in sociology at Princeton University and, subsequently, a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College, I moved from being a commenter at other people’s blogs to a state blogger and a contributing editor at Daily Kos. Blogging led me to find work in the labor movement, where I am just doing a different kind of sociology.

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Leo W. Gerard

The son of a union miner, Leo W. Gerard started working at Inco’s nickel smelter in Sudbury, Ontario, at age 18 and rose through the union ranks to be elected to his first full term as international president of the United Steelworkers by acclamation in 2001. Gerard had served as the Steelworkers’ seventh international president, having been appointed to the presidency by the union’s International Executive Board upon the retirement of the previous president, George Becker. In his first full term, Gerard has launched a wide range of initiatives that have brought more than 350,000 workers into the union’s ranks—a 60 percent increase.

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Mike Hall

I’m a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. I came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. When my collar was still blue, I carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. I’ve also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold my blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent. You may have seen me at one of several hundred Grateful Dead shows. I was the one with longhair and the tie-dye. Still have the shirts, lost the hair.

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Donna M. Jablonski

I’m the AFL-CIO’s deputy director of public affairs for publications, Web and broadcast. Prior to joining the AFL-CIO in 1997, I served as publications director at the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund for 12 years. I began my career as a newspaper reporter in Southwest Florida, and since have written, edited and managed production of advocacy materials— including newsletters, books, brochures, booklets, fliers, calendars, websites, posters and direct response mail and e-mail—to support economic and social justice campaigns. In June 2001, I received a B.A. in Labor Studies from the National Labor College. Most important: I’m the very proud mom of a spectacular daughter.

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Seth D. Michaels

I’m the coordinator of the AFL-CIO’s presidential candidate website, Working Families Vote 2008. Prior to arriving at the AFL-CIO, I worked on online mobilization for Moveon.org, Blue State Digital and the National Jewish Democratic Council. I spent two years touring the country as a member of the Late Night Players, a sketch comedy troupe—but the battles of U.S. politics are even more entertaining.

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James Parks

My first encounter with unions was at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when my colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. I saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. I am a journalist by trade, and I worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. I also have been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. My proudest career moment, though, was when I served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections.

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Gordon Pavy

My first union job was in high school as a member of the Retail Clerks, which later became the United Food and Commercial Workers. After a stint in the Navy during the Vietnam war, I returned to my job in the grocery store before going to college on the GI Bill. With a master’s degree in Labor Studies under my belt, I returned to the labor movement and worked some short stints as a researcher for the AFT, UAW and AFSCME. I landed at the Teamsters in 1983 then came to the AFL-CIO in 1986. I have been a youth baseball coach for 12 years and enjoy weekends away on my Harley.

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Daniel Pedrotty

Within the AFL-CIO Office of Investment, my focus centers on providing corporate governance strategies for pension funds and trustees. I also concentrate on regulatory issues before the Securities and Exchange Commission and monitor retirement security fights in the states. I graduated from Dickinson College and Wake Forest Law School. Before joining the AFL-CIO in 2004, I worked for law firms in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and as a researcher for the Gephardt for President campaign.

My introduction to the labor movement came from an uncle who is an organizer for University Professional and Technical Employees-CWA (UPTE-CWA) in California. In my free time, I obsess over the inability of the Phillies, Eagles, Sixers and Flyers to win a championship.

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John Small

I still remember the wild excitement that day in June 1984 when reporters and editors at the Milwaukee Sentinel and Journal voted to join The Newspaper Guild (now part of CWA). I have been a Guild member ever since, as a copy editor at the Sentinel, assistant editor of the Guild Reporter and copy editor at BNA’s Environment Reporter before joining the AFL-CIO publications staff in 2006. During my college years at St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee, I was a member of the National Maritime Union, Seafarers and the UAW—while working summer jobs on a Great Lakes cruise ship and oil tanker and at a plant making hay baler motors.

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