AFL-CIO Delegates: Jazzed and Ready to Rock
| Kathy Scott |
| Sylvia Wilson |
| Rick Bloomingdale |
The Jacob L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh is filled with union members and leaders taking part in the AFL-CIO’s 26th Constitutional Convention, many of them first-time convention delegates like Lisha Thayer from Mine Workers Local 717 member from New York. (See Thayer and many other AFL-CIO delegates at our convention video page here.)
“I’m hoping to bring back ideas to get the union involved more, more women involved in the local, with the idea I’d like to come back and say that each one reached each one of us.”
Another first-time convention participant, AFL-CIO Convention delegate Sylvia Wilson, a member of AFT, the Allegheny County (Pa.) Central Labor Council and the A. Philip Randolph Institute, was among more than 500 participants at the AFL-CIO Diversity Conference Sunday in Pittsburgh.
“I want to see what’s going on in the Diversity Conference that I can carry out and apply to what I’m doing….What way can we reach out to bring more minorities in and what can we do as union members to go into the community and continue to bring more people up and elevate them and their status where they can take care of their families and have a living wage.”
Veteran delegate Richard Shaw, secretary-treasurer of the Harris County AFL-CIO Council in Houston, has been to many conventions and is “very excited about renewed activism in the AFL-CIO.”
“We’re certainly going to be working on health care reform and Employee Free Choice Act and I think the excitement of that and the excitement of the new officers is going to re-energize our labor movement. So I’m looking for new energy and new direction from our officers.”
Henderson Tells Convention: Employee Choice Is Civil Rights Issue
As the AFL-CIO Convention prepared to vote on Resolution 1 on organizing, Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), told the delegates that the freedom to form unions is a civil rights issue.
He called for Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and pledged that the civil rights community will work “shoulder to shoulder” with workers to pass the bill.
Union participation can begin to lift the dead weight of decades of discrimination. For African Americans, women and Latinos the best way to build a better life is to join together with others to form a union.
Civil Rights Leaders Urge Passage of Employee Free Choice
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Martin Luther King Jr. often drew the parallels and connections between the civil rights and union movements. Today, on the eve of the anniversary of King’s assassination, national civil rights leaders called for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers the choice of how to form a union.
During a telephone press conference, Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), a coalition of some 200 organizations, pointed out that unions have been one of the main vehicles for African Americans to move into the middle class.
The Employee Free Choice Act has been largely written about as a labor bill but those of us in the civil rights community know it is so much more…workers’ rights are civil rights; and that the right to organize is a civil and human rights issue of the first magnitude.
