WASHINGTON —AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond is repeating a somber warning to workers, union and non-union alike: This November’s election is not just about the presidency, but about democracy.
Redmond told a panel discussion at the Labor Department on September 17, the anniversary of the founders’ signing the Constitution, that organized labor must lead the fight to preserve the republic.
“Unions thrive in democratic countries and in countries where you have democratic principles. They don’t survive in autocracies and dictatorships,” Redmond declared.
“So we have the responsibility to fight for democracy and it should be the responsibility of the entire labor movement to lead that fight.”
Redmond didn’t need to spell out the political choice by name to the assembled crowd at DOL. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, her party’s nominee to succeed her boss, Joe Biden, has repeatedly pledged to obey, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.
Her foe, Republican Donald Trump, Biden’s predecessor and a convicted felon, has said he’ll be a dictator on day one. Nobody, including his own supporters, believes he’ll stop then. Trump says he’ll junk parts of the nation’s basic charter that he doesn’t like. He tried to overturn the peaceful succession of power three and a half years ago, inciting what even he calls “an insurrection.”
Redmond spoke during a series of events that day, one to induct unions into DOL’s “Hall of Service,” and the other to both recognize working women and show how far they still have to go for equality. One panel also discussed how organized labor should change in the next 100 years.
Changing how labor operates meant different ideas to different panelists. The most outspoken was new Service Employees President April Verrett. Her union was one of those inducted into the hall.
“We need enough worker power to do right by workers,” union and non-union, said Verrett. Her solution is to organize and empower the unorganized. “We need to be multigenerational, multilayered, multiracial, and multicultural.
“We have to create space for people who look like we do,” she told colleagues on a panel, all of whom were women, workers of color, or both. “We have to organize the most marginalized” to consolidate both union gains and democratic norms, Verrett added.
“We cannot rely on the same rules, the same culture, and the same way we operated” for the last century. “We need new rules, like sectoral bargaining, and new leadership and new institutions.
“Let’s go beyond the National Labor Relations Act and the Protect the Right To Organize Act,” she urged. Congressional Republicans, who opposed the NLRA when it was enacted during the New Deal, have weakened it since and still seek to do so under Trump. Adverse judicial decisions blew further holes into the law, making labor law overall pro-corporate.
The PRO Act, labor’s top legislative priority, is designed to close most, if not all, of those holes and restore the balance between workers and the corporate chieftains who now rule.
The other DOL session honored the gains by working women while noting how far they have to go.
That was symbolized by a follow-up film to the epic 9to5 and a point speakers made that working women still earn only 82 cents for every dollar a working man makes—and even less than that for working women of color. The median is where half the group is above and half below.
Verrett was among the leaders at both ceremonies and the panel discussion before the film. One event inducted new unions into DOL’s “Century of Service Honor Roll of American Labor Organizations,” by commemorating those organizations’ centennials—all of which occurred at least three years ago, since the last such induction occurred in 2013.
That session was designed to show how far working women had come in breaking various glass ceilings, though, since it was on federal property, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler took the lead in praising the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration for putting workers first, giving them a seat at the table and encouraging organizing.
The ultimate glass ceiling, the presidency, would be smashed if voters elevate Harris to the White House this fall.
The new unions on the honor roll, besides SEIU, are the Train Dispatchers, the Fire Fighters, the Professional and Technical Engineers, the National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees, the National Federation of Federal Employees—now a Machinists sector–the Postal Mail Handlers/ Laborers and the Roofers. The agency also honored the Federation of Police.
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