Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

So many bastards, so little time.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

We will not go back.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

All hail the time of the bunny!

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

You are here: Home / Absent Friends / RIP Richard Trumka

RIP Richard Trumka

by | 30 Comments

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Per the AP:

… President Joe Biden eulogized Trumka from the White House and said the labor leader had died of a heart attack while on a camping trip with his son and grandkids. He said he spoke with Trumka’s widow and son earlier in the day.

“He wasn’t just a great labor leader. He was a friend,“ Biden told reporters Thursday. “He was someone I could confide in, and you knew, whatever he said he would do, he would do.”

A burly man with thick eyebrows and a bushy mustache, Trumka was the son and grandson of coal miners. He was born in 1949 in the small southwest Pennsylvania town of Nemacolin and worked for seven years in the mines before earning an accounting degree from Penn State and then a law degree from Villanova University…

Until his death, he used his power to push for health care legislation, expanded workers rights and infrastructure spending.

Trumka was focused on the future, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler said, in the form of the proposed $1 trillion infrastructure bill that he believed would propel organized labor forward…

Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, perhaps Trumka’s closest ally during Obama’s presidency, remembered Trumka as the “son and grandson of a miner,” who brought that family history to the halls of power in Washington.

“You know, Rich had a view of the White House from his office,” Perez said, recalling that Trumka displayed one of father’s mining helmets in his office. “His father and grandfather never could have imagined their son and grandson ascending to such a high level. But what they’d be even more proud of is that he didn’t allow it to go to his head. He never forgot his roots.”

Solidarity is a virtue we neither discuss nor practice enough. We hear a lot about compassion and empathy, and certainly need more of both. But solidarity is a deeper commitment, rooted in equality and mutuality.

Pope John Paul II saw solidarity not as a feeling of “shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people” but as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to . . . the good of all and of each individual because we are all really responsible for all.”

I don’t think Richard Trumka, the descendant of Polish immigrants, would mind my quoting the Polish pontiff to explain why I will miss his voice…

He never, ever looked down on the White working class in which he was nurtured as the third generation who went into the coal mines. He made the case for racial justice as an old-fashioned trade unionist who understood the costs of racial division — to everyone.

Trumka had the eloquence of the plain-spoken, one reason that a speech he gave at a steelworkers convention on behalf of Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign went viral.

“We can’t tap-dance around the fact that there’s a lot of folks out there,” Trumka said, “and a lot of them are good union people, they just can’t get past the idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a Black man.”

This was wrong, he said, and deadly to workers’ interests. “There’s no evil that’s inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism, and it’s something that we in the labor movement have a very, very special responsibility to challenge,” he said. “It’s our special responsibility because we know better than anyone else how racism is used to divide working people.”

An important fact about Trumka: He didn’t have to follow his father and grandfather into the mines. This college and law-school graduate could have joined many in his generation who moved up and out. But he saw his future with the union, and to lead it, he had to respect the rules requiring time near the coalface.

“There aren’t many lawyers going underground and breathing as much coal dust as Rich did,” said Don Stillman, who was a strategist for Miners for Democracy, the movement that reformed the autocratic and corrupt mineworkers union. “That’s tough work. It’s dirty. It’s dangerous.”

And Trumka, Stillman added, threw in his lot with “the miners who had the courage to fight the status quo in his own union.”…

Reader Interactions

30Comments

  1. 1.

    debbie

    I was sad to hear Trumka had passed. He was a union official who genuinely cared about his members.

  3. 3.

    stinger

    Sounds like this is a huge loss to all Americans, as well as to his family. Are there similar union leaders ready to step up? I’ll go read the Loomis piece — thanks, rage.

  4. 4.

    James E Powell

    Tough time to be a labor union leader. I wonder what percentage of AFL-CIO members are consistent Democratic voters.

  6. 6.

    laura

    Richard Trumpka was a true friend of the worker and his commitment to improving the working conditions; especially workplace safety and health & welfare alone should earn him the respect of all working people. His calling out the racism and sexism as bad, in and of itself, but especially as a tool to divide, conquer and vote against your own interests is what ought to earn him the admiration of all Americans.  It’s no secret why wages have stagnated since the Reagan Democrats let their racist freak flags fly and are now MAGA fascists. Labor is one of the very few threats to capital and that’s why the party of unaccountable wealth and power continues to try and crush it. But try convincing regular Jane and Joe Lunchbucket that.

  8. 8.

    Yutsano

    Trumka was very supportive of public sector unions. Although my union isn’t in the AFL-CIO (my understanding is it’s barred by statute) we all knew who Trumka was and how he stood behind us. He’s going to leave a very big hole that will be tough to fill. Although if two women are the leading candidates then that could be interesting. Whether that’s good or or bad interesting is yet to be determined.

  9. 9.

    burnspbesq

    The deck is thoroughly stacked against labor. Example: the UAW couldn’t organize VW Chattanooga even with the support of the company.

  12. 12.

    Elizabelle

    I’d be interested in seeing more video of Trumka’s speeches.  Kay put up a good one of him addressing Pennsylvanians and union members who were reluctant to vote for Obama because of race.  No words minced.

    He was a good, good man.  72 seems young; he was prominent for a long time, though

    ETA:  And here is that video.  From July 2008; 7:40 and worth a watch.  Richard Trumka on Racism and Obama

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QIGJTHdH50

  13. 13.

    Jager

    My great grandfather on my mom’s side left Wales after a mining disaster almost blew up his village and closed the mine. He joined a group of young miners and moved to the US at 17. He met my great-grandmother, he was 19 she was 17. They married. He was killed in a mining accident at 21, leaving my great-grandmother a widow of  19 with two baby girls. When young John Harris was killed while digging coal, he was owed 4 days’ pay, my great-grandmother Alice had to beg the company for the money. My great-grandfather’s story and so many more like his, were stories Rich Trumka never forgot.

  14. 14.

    Kathleen

    Posted this in thread downstairs:

    OT but this article about Richard Trumka and how he used his Catholic faith to work with allies in the Church to champion workers’ rights is fascinating. It also outlines how progressive forces in the Church are combatting the Christo Fascist faction which champions full blown fascism.  As a fallen away Catholic I found this piece from the National Catholic Reporter which has always been a progressive voice in the Church to be uplifting.

    https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/tribute-trumka-catholic-whose-work-we-must-carry

  15. 15.

    Elizabelle

    The Trumka link I posted rolls right into this 35 minute speech.  Trumka speaking about Ferguson, MO and racism, in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny8loBhqmhc

    Looks like a very good Youtube thread.  Has Obama’s 2004 keynote, which to this date, I have never seen.

  17. 17.

    geg6

    @Elizabelle:

    OMG, you must watch the Obama speech.  Most charismatic thing I’ve ever seen.  I remember watching it in real time with my ex.  We were both standing and cheering in our living room by the end.  We both said at the time that he could be the first Black president.  He was still just a state senator at the time.  It was amazing and I have memories of JFK, RFK and MLK.  He was as good or better as any of them when it comes to inspiration.

  18. 18.

    PST

    @Elizabelle: That speech was really something. There was a directness to it that not everyone would be able to pull off. I can imagine giving a speech to a bunch of fellow lawyers, for example, knowing full well that some of them would refuse to vote for a Black man. But if I tried to give a speech explaining why racism is wrong and the Black candidate was the one on their side, they would react with umbrage to the insulting suggestion that they needed to a lecture like that. Trumka with that audience was able to make an inspiring speech, with plain language and no apologies.

  19. 19.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

     Union Leader Gives Impassioned Anti-Racism Speech

    October 6, 2008

    A top U.S. labor leader is making an unusually blunt pitch to working-class white voters in key battleground states. Longtime United Mine Workers President Richard Trumka, who is now secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, is making the case for Sen. Barack Obama.

    For the past several months, Trumka, 59, has been giving speeches on the issue of race and the presidential election. It’s a reaction to racist comments he has personally encountered. In an interview, he said he felt compelled to personally challenge anyone in the labor movement who may not vote for Obama because he is black.

    Confronting this, Trumka said, is labor’s responsibility “because we know, better than anyone else, how racism is used to divide working people.”

    Trumka pointed out that this is hardly new territory for the labor movement. In the 1960s, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther and others in organized labor marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Trumka also pointed out that labor was deeply involved, through boycotts and educational activity, in the effort to end the era of apartheid in South Africa.

    Rest in peace. You’ll always be remembered.

  20. 20.

    Elizabelle

    @geg6:   I will!  This week.  In honor of his big 60.

    I never knew anything about BHO until the fall of 2007.  And Michelle was the gateway drug!

  23. 23.

    NotMax

    OT.

    Dick Farrel, a former right-wing radio host in Florida and anchor on Newsmax TV, died Wednesday of complications from Covid-19, NBC affiliate WPTV of West Palm Beach reported.
    [snip]
    Farrel was a vocal and staunch advocate against the coronavirus vaccines, which he posted about on social media, once calling them “bogus.” He also railed against figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom he called a “lying freak.”

    However, after he contracted Covid-19, friends said, Farrel’s attitude about the vaccines and the virus changed, WPTV reported. Source

  24. 24.

    Kay

    @James E Powell:

    I wonder what percentage of AFL-CIO members are consistent Democratic voters.

    If it was a national count they wouldn’t matter so much, but it isn’t – where they are, and are needed for Democrats to win, in the Great Lakes states and Pennsylvania- they’re essential. They are more Democratic than other groups of non-college white men and in a group Democrats have trouble with any uptick in key states is important.
    The rank and file membership are different than the local leaders, too. The people who “get involved” at the local level are nearly all Democrats and activist Democrats- engaged.

  25. 25.

    Elizabelle

    @NotMax:   That Phil Valentine conservative radio guy outta Tennessee isn’t doing too well either.  Family still asking for prayers.  Still hospitalized.

    Per a recent report, the doctors have the atrial fibrillation somewhat under control, but his lungs are still a major issue.  Per WaPost a few days ago, he is on an ECMO machine, which is a step beyond a ventilator.

    He seems genuinely contrite, although I do not think this country suffers from a dearth of rightwing shock jocks

    ETA:  I rather regret injecting Farrel and Valentine into this thread about the valiant Richard Trumka.  Who had wonderful values.  Actual ones!

  26. 26.

    geg6

    @Kay:

    Did some work with the local Laborers Union on local school board and municipal elections in the small town where I lived with my ex.  Those guys were the best.  We won some and we lost some, but they were excellent volunteers.  Wish all volunteers were that good and hard working.

  27. 27.

    Kay

    We lost a local labor stalwart here last week. A 72 year old electrician – he was a former Marine and Obama gave him one one of those coins at a rally we were at in Bowling Green Ohio and he started to cry. I’m a dope so I didn’t understand what had happened – all I saw was a handshake- until his wife explained it to me.
    Years ago he built a toboggan run on rural property he owned. It was just amazing – a complicated wooden structure because it’s so flat here and he had to make inclines. Tons of people used it. They would park in his field and go do the run – his two pretty teenage daughters would herd the little kids on and off, up and down the stairs. Just a wonderful man. I will miss him.

  28. 28.

    laura

    As a reluctantly retired Union Business Agent who was privileged to represent blue collar public sector Union Members, this is a poem that I’d recite on retirement when the opportunity arose:
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use
    There’s just so few rituals or ceremonies to mark events that appear to be mundane but are actually truly meaningful outside of a religious setting.
    Working people deserve their flowers.

     

  29. 29.

    MontyTheClipArtMongoose

    will richard ojeda & michael moore be buried alive in trumpka’s sepulcher with the thinskinned lester maddox democrat

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