- Gallery: Union leader Richard Trumka visits hometown haunts
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Union leader Richard Trumka visits hometown haunts
NEMACOLIN, Pa. - In the morning, a silver mist rolls off the mountains, spiraling up from the hills of this former mining town 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, now a ghostly shadow of what it once was.
The mine is closed. The houses are worn, evidence of the relentless nature of mining, an industry that extracts its treasure from the earth, leaving behind faded towns in tired hollows.
The man who on Wednesday will become the nation's most powerful labor leader grew up here.
"It was a big deal for me to go to Pittsburgh and sit in the bleachers to watch the Pirates with the Little League," Richard Trumka mused, outside his old union hall perched on a rise down the hill from the two-bedroom home where he grew up.
On Wednesday, in a convention center in Pittsburgh, Trumka, the son and grandson of coal miners and a coal miner himself, will become president of the 11-million-member AFL-CIO.
He is unopposed to replace retiring president John Sweeney, 75, who elevated Trumka, a graduate of Villanova University's law school, to the top ranks of union leadership in 1995, when Sweeney became AFL-CIO president.
Trumka, 60, will lead the nation's largest labor federation at a challenging time for the union movement.
These days, the union promise of better wages and benefits seems thin when nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed and nothing seems to stop the flood of layoffs.
Unions have been battered by the economy, as union workers face stinging criticism for trying to save generous wages and benefits negotiated in better times.
"Even when there are bad conditions, if it weren't for the unions, the workers would get nothing," said Trumka, back in Nemacolin for a visit last week.
Part of the time, it was like the old days, sitting on the porch of the United Mine Workers of America union hall, shooting the breeze with union and hunting buddies.
In the morning, a crew filmed him in what passes for a town square in Nemacolin. His humble beginnings will be writ large in an inspirational video projected on mega screens at the convention.
Then Trumka drove around town, pointing out the bowling alley that is gone, the movie theater that is now an empty lot, the swimming pool that no longer exists.
On the national stage, Trumka will be the man who leads an organization credited, in no small part, with helping to elect President Obama.
Trumka will work on issues such as health care, international trade, pension reform, and legislation to make union organizing easier. It will be up to him to reverse a general trend of declining membership while making unions relevant.
Labor insiders say he will add dynamism to the AFL-CIO, a change from Sweeney, who is known as a nice man but not a hard driver like Trumka, long the heir apparent.
But Randel Johnson, senior vice president for labor and employment for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, does not expect much change.
"I think he'll be more aggressive, but it will end up being more of the same," Johnson said. "Like Sweeney, Trumka seems to demonize employers like they haven't changed since the 1930s. That rhetoric doesn't bode well for our ability to work with labor at the political level."
Trumka vows to install an army of 1,000 organizers who will be dispatched around the country to help workers who want to form unions. He'll reach out to the young.
"We have to signal to them that we are willing to change our ways of doing things to meet their needs," he said.
