Trumka Claims Gov. Snyder is a Liability to GOP
A lot of people would think the passage of right-to-work legislation in union-stronghold Michigan signifies broader troubles for an embattled labor movement. But Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO labor federation, said he thinks that Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) signing of the controversial anti-union bill suggests greater troubles for the GOP.
“It tells you what one of the major problems of the Republican Party is,” Trumka told The Huffington Post in an interview on Michigan and the labor movement more generally. “They are controlled by the Tea Party extreme right, and the leadership doesn’t know how to stand up to them. A weak guy like Snyder doesn’t know how to stand up to them.”
. . . “When you look at collective bargaining itself, when people got a chance to vote on collective bargaining, Ohio is probably the only place where you had a head-to-head vote, and we won [61 to 39 percent] in that.”
That said, he concedes unions are not winning the larger messaging battle, failing to make the case for the necessity of collective bargaining in the broader economy.
“Not yet, no,” Trumka said. “But we’re talking about that. And it’s not just the messaging war. You can have the perfect message and still be the imperfect deliverer. What we’re trying to do is tailor the right messages with the right union movement.”
Trumka, who conceded that Snyder may have been emboldened by the failed recall on Walker in Wisconsin, said he believes it’s important that a message be sent to governors who champion or abet legislation hostile to collective bargaining.
“We’ve already started that,” Trumka said of a mobilization in Michigan. “Our unions are beginning to have a conversation with their members, starting to educate them from the ground level up on the economy, on power, on workers, about friends and about enemies. That’s a conversation that will only accelerate as we go forward, in a very significant way.
“And it’s not just Michigan,” he added.