Richard L. Trumka Archive

Working people deserve to go to work every day without fear for their safety or being harassed. They deserve to go out the door and make a living without worrying about their lives being upended. These are sacred tenets people and their unions value.

Hotel workers, farm workers, teachers, taxi drivers, airport, construction and retail workers have been making their voices heard in Los Angeles; Phoenix; Austin, Texas; New York City; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and many points in between over the past week. Why?  We are defending our neighbors, co-workers and friends who are being swept up in a series of immigration raids. Working people understand in our bones that when the government terrorizes people who are simply living their lives and going to work each day, we all lose. When we allow ourselves to be divided, we are weak, when we are weak, standards erode for all of us.  

The early weeks of the Trump administration have sent alarming signals that its law enforcement priorities will target and punish working people, rather than those who steal their wages, harass them on the job and expose them to dangerous working conditions. Such strategies make people afraid to go to work and take their children to school, let alone take action to demand better working conditions or speak up when they encounter abuse. Moreover, they drive down the pay and protections for all working people—immigrant and non-immigrant alike.

After the election, we made clear that we would hold Donald Trump accountable to the promises he made to working people throughout the campaign.

His initial nominations fundamentally threaten these promises.  Taken together, the appointments push President-elect Trump away from the values and issues that working class voters said were most important to them. 

As a candidate, President-elect Trump railed against Wall Street greed and the failure of big banks to invest in America, yet his nominee for Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is a billionaire who got rich by foreclosing on the homes of hard-working American families. 

After six long years, the secrecy is over. The public finally has a chance to scrutinize the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership for themselves instead of having to rely on characterizations made by the agreement’s supporters. America’s  voters can now make their own judgment about whether it meets their high standards for a 21st century agreement that will raise wages, protect our democracy and promote sustainable growth and development.  

From what we have reviewed so far, we are deeply disappointed that our policy recommendations and those of our trade reform allies in the environmental, consumer, public health, global development and business sectors were largely ignored. The investment rules still provide expansive new legal rights and powers to foreign businesses to challenge legitimate government actions, the labor enforcement provisions are still inadequate to address the enormous challenges posed by this deal and the lack of enforceable currency rules subject to trade sanctions mean the promised new export markets may never materialize. 

Our country is addicted to cheap labor, and our broken immigration system helps to feed the addiction. Immigrant workers themselves are not to blame for stagnant wages in our country. The problem is caused by employers who put profits ahead of people, and trample rights and drive down standards in the process.

For far too long, our immigration system has put all of the cards in the hands of employers and allowed them to wield entirely too much power over millions of captive and exploitable workers in our labor force. To fix that, immigrant workers in the U.S. need full rights and citizenship -- and we must insist on rights and protections for those who will come in the future as well.

Demanding reforms to abusive guestworker programs serves the long-term interests of all working people. So we should stop to ask ourselves, who exactly is leading the push for more visas that treat workers as a commodity?

Those calls are certainly not coming from Marisela Valdez and Isy Gonzalez, who were threatened at gunpoint, cheated, and held in slave-like conditions as H-2b visa seafood workers in Louisiana.

In too many corners of our nation, black and brown Americans are suffering under the weight of a criminal justice system that disproportionately harms people of color. The AFL-CIO enthusiastically supports the efforts of President Obama to make our laws fairer and more effective.

When a nonviolent offender spends a decade or more of their life behind bars because of mandatory minimum sentencing, no one benefits. When those who have paid their debt to society cannot find housing or a job, the entire economy suffers. When a generation of young Americans advance through our prison system instead of our school system, our nation is weaker for it.

Simply put, mass incarceration is ineffective, racist, and morally bankrupt. It is up to all of us -- business and labor, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative -- to do something about it.

The numbers are staggering. Black Americans make up 13 percent of our population, yet 38 percent of those incarcerated. As President Obama pointed out, we imprison more people than the top 35 European countries combined. We have an epidemic on our hands.

This month, I joined the chairman of the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many other leaders to call on our nation to act now on a pressing need—bringing our infrastructure into the 21st century.

Dozens of organizations from business, labor and the infrastructure community held scores of events around the country during Infrastructure Week to raise awareness about the infrastructure challenges we face. Our roads, bridges, waterways, harbors, ports, airports, transit, rail, energy grid, pipelines, Internet and telecommunication, sewers and drinking water system are all aging and falling further into disrepair.

Repairing and modernizing our infrastructure has been and continues to be a top priority for the AFL-CIO and our affiliated unions. Infrastructure Week provided an opportunity for new voices and ideas to be heard and the opportunity to reach new audiences.

The facts and choices are clear. We have been neglecting and underfunding our infrastructure for decades. Most notably, the quadrennial report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) documented the $3.6 trillion needed just to bring our current infrastructure systems into a state of good repair.

That’s a big number, but what does it mean?

We spend a lot of time talking about trade, all of us. If you read the newspapers, it doesn’t take long to pick up the battle lines, the main theories and talking points. But at the end of the day, the partisan battles are just so much noise. For me, it’s all got to come back to one simple question: Is our trade policy working for America’s workers and for our nation as a whole?

The simple answer is no. It isn’t. I don’t think anyone can credibly argue that America’s trade policies are working for American workers, for our friends from the neighborhood, for our kids or our home towns. 

And nor do I think the macroeconomic numbers support an argument that our current trade policy is working—whether you look at our chronic current account deficits, our net international debt position, or the broader labor market data on wage stagnation and growing inequality.

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We recently celebrated the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a tireless champion of the fundamental human dignity of every man, woman and child, and a dear friend of the labor movement. It is in his memory and out of respect for the solidarity between Dr. King and the labor leaders of his time that we carry on the fight for fairness wherever it may take us.

That fight includes the right to affordable and fair housing without discrimination. The Supreme Court will soon decide one of the most important civil rights cases of our time, a case with the potential to put justice out of reach for working Americans. Currently, victims of housing discrimination may bring a complaint when there is clear evidence that a housing provider intended to discriminate, or when a practice or policy that is not intentionally discriminatory has a negative impact on a particular group of people, like female heads of households or persons with disabilities. This second approach is based on the disparate-impact protections of the Fair Housing Act and it is precisely what is at stake in this Supreme Court case.

Hundreds of Walmart Moms are going on strike this week in dozens of cities across the country to protest Walmart’s terrible treatment of working women. Their courage is admirable. It’s not easy to take on Walmart, especially because the company has a history of illegally retaliating against its workers.

But the striking moms won’t be alone. They will be joined at many of the protests by working families, including religious and community groups and the broader labor movement. And because not everyone can join a picket line, many more working people will be speaking out in solidarity at community centers, at union halls and online.

Many of us are lending our voices to this important cause because its significance cannot be overstated. When a company denies its workers fair wages and human dignity, it’s an outrage. But when that company is the largest employer in the country, it’s an economic disaster.

Football players at Northwestern University will make history this Friday that has nothing to do with yards gained, tackles made or touchdowns scored. They will be the first group of collegiate athletes—athletes who are the key to the $6 billion-a-year big-time college sports industry—to vote on joining a union.

Three years ago, the U.S. and Colombian governments made numerous and specific promises to improve labor rights in Colombia. At the time, the U.S. government said fulfilling these promises would be a precondition to enacting any free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia. Presidents Obama and Santos announced a “Labor Action Plan (LAP),” which was supposed to fix many of the enduring problems that have prevented Colombian workers from freely and safely exercising their rights.

The LAP was supposed to improve respect for labor rights to make possible the implementation of a free trade agreement between our two countries. A year after announcing the LAP, the two governments moved forward to implement the trade agreement.

A raise is just the first step. Falling real wages is at the heart of what is wrong today.

The U.S. Senate will begin debate soon on Sen. Tom Harkin's proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. The increase is critical for the 1.7 million workers who earn the minimum wage. But perhaps more importantly, it is a critical first step toward addressing the problem of a generation of flat and falling wages for the majority of the American workforce.