Via Esquire
Richard Trumka stands at the podium like a man with his foot in the doorway of history, relaxed and confident and grinning at the audience. Wisconsin? The attempted murder of public unions? That was actually a win, he says.
A big beefy guy with a bristling mustache and Blagojevich hair, Trumka started life as a coal miner. His grandfather was a union man. His father was a union man. He became a union man and put himself through college on the midnight shift, leading many bitter strikes in the coal patch where rock-throwing miners confronted guards with machine guns, scenes from an epic American history few people remember. Two years ago he rose to the top of the American labor movement, president of the AFL-CIO, where he represents twelve million firefighters, teachers, nurses, miners, electricians, and entertainers. He came in with a lifetime's worth of dreams for reviving labor and saving America. So when Governor Scott Walker this year took away the right of collective bargaining for government workers in Wisconsin, the law of the land for seventy-five years, Walker didn't just aim a dagger straight at the heart of American labor, he aimed it at Rich Trumka's heart.
But Trumka is grinning. "We've been trying for three decades to get a national debate on collective bargaining. Scott Walker gave us the national debate we were looking for."
By national debate he means thousands of angry citizens marching in the street. Occupying the state capitol. Mounting recall elections. That's the kind of national debate Trumka thinks America needs.
"Now 70-some percent of Americans think every worker, public or private, ought to have the right to collective bargaining."
So would you support going after Walker?
Trumka doesn't hesitate. "Would I support going after Lucifer? Of course — the guy's been a bad governor, he tried to use a contrived deficit to take people out."
Within hours, this will be denounced as hate speech on right-wing blogs.
And the Occupy Wall Street protests, some recent union locals becoming involved — do you have an opinion on that?
Hell yes, he has an opinion. Unions have been trying to tell people that Wall Street is out of control since about forever. They've warned about lost jobs and stagnant wages and the insane wealth of the top 1 percent for almost as long. They've been major players in the push to reregulate Wall Street. They've been leading the fight against lavish executive pay. From the beginning of the protests, union bus drivers refused to take people to jail. The first major endorsement of the protesters came in the form of seven hundred union steelworkers.
"I think being in the streets and calling attention to issues is sometimes the only recourse you have," Trumka says. "Wall Street is out of control. Calling attention to it and peacefully protesting is a very legitimate way of doing it. I've done it thousands of times myself and I'll do it again."
On the right-wing blogs, Trumka is called "the spiritual father whose attention is craved by the anarcho-communists in Zuccotti Park."
A few days later, Trumka takes the protesters water and bagels.
In the endless war over America, which is always a war over different versions of American history, a new battle has begun.
There's the White House just outside Trumka's window, so close he has to call the Secret Service every time he wants to go out on his balcony. Trumka pays no attention. "We have fourteen million Americans out of work," he says. "We have twenty-five million Americans that want to work full time and can't find a full-time job. We have record numbers of people who have been out of work for longer than six months — companies now beginning to say, 'If you've been out for six months, don't apply. Don't apply. In order to get this job, you must already have a job.'"
There's a hammering urgency in his voice you don't hear from most other people in public life these days, partly because everybody else realizes they don't have real solutions to offer. Republicans think that all we can do is cut taxes and cut regulations and wait for capitalism to heal itself. Democrats want to raise taxes a little on the rich and try another little stimulus and wait for capitalism to heal itself.
Trumka thinks they are both wrong — dangerously, destructively wrong.
"This is what we need — to be able to share the wealth more equitably. That's how the middle class was built, from '46 to '73, and that's how it should be built again. 'Cause the country isn't poor, the country's as rich as it ever was. Our wealth is just concentrated in the hands of very few. More people need to get a bigger share of what's being produced."
Free markets? He has no patience for such talk. "It's an insane system right now. We just came through a period where all the major premises that they relied on have been disproven. And yet they still cling to them — 'Get everything out of the way of the market and everything will be fine.' We know that's not true."
Or the idea that austerity will improve the economy.
"Look at Greece — the more austerity they push on Greece, the deeper the recession and the more debt they have. It's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting to get a different result."
Even the idea that aid to the elderly, the sick, and the helpless — the social services that conservatives have taught us to call "entitlements" — is a drain on the economy.
"Lemme give you facts. That tax cut that they gave to the middle class there, each dollar generated a dollar four in economic activity. Dollar four cents. You know what a dollar in food stamps generates? Dollar seventy-four cents. Which one's the most effective? Which one?"
The root cause of our crisis, Trumka argues, is the small government "neoliberal" economics pioneered by Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago. He asks for a copy of Naomi Klein'sThe Shock Doctrine.
"Hey Norma? Do we have a copy of The Shock Doctrine back there?"
"Let me look."
Standing at the bookshelf, Trumka flips through the book, which is heavily marked on every page. It tells the history of the last forty years pretty much the way Trumka sees it, which is that our troubles all started when Friedman taught dictators in Chile and Argentina to privatize the economy by selling off state assets and cutting back on public health care and retirement, ideas that proved so unpopular they had to be imposed at gunpoint. In the United States, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker put Friedman's ideas into practice when trying to stop inflation in the 1970s — the first "austerity" program. Then Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the rise of the modern conservative movement made these ideas so popular they have become the air we breathe, the water in which we swim. And the result has been the same everywhere: The rich get much richer and the poor get much poorer, and more plentiful.
These are some of the reasons why, long before it became the latest media obsession, Richard Trumka has been warning about the increasing gulf between the rich and poor.
"In the last twenty years, 100 percent of all the productivity gains have gone to the top 10 percent. Think about that — one hundred percent! And 30 percent of that has gone to the top one tenth of 1 percent. So that means that in the last twenty years, 100 percent of the gains have gone to the top 10 and the rest of us have gotten no income gain at all — flat wages. You have to put together a complete package that reverses that, that creates good jobs, and don't listen to anybody out there that says, 'We can't do it because of the global economy.'"
So what's the alternative? Consider Germany, he says — it has free health care, secure retirement, generous unemployment, and a higher standard of living than America, along with powerful unions that push for high-skill, high-wage jobs. And because of this splendid safety net, the German economy and workforce also experienced much less trauma during the crash. If people don't have money, the economy grinds to a halt and social pathologies develop that make things worse. "Efficient" Friedmanite capitalism turns out to be too efficient, relentlessly distributing the wealth upward. So small government by definition makes the rich richer, and larger government puts the money back in the hands of the people who will spend it. The only solution is to "spread the wealth," the very thing Republicans and even Democrats are so afraid to do.
"You have a $2.2 trillion infrastructure deficit, 351 stalled construction projects in America at this very moment. If we build bridges, roads, rails, the grid system, that would create jobs, make us more competitive as a nation, and propel us forward."
And the debt we pass on to our children?
"It's an investment. People say, 'You can't, you have to live within your means.' Well, lemme ask you this: I make $50,000 a year. I buy a house that's worth $250,000. Takes me twenty years to pay it off. When it's paid off, it's worth $400,000. Have I lived within my means? I was investing in my future and in my livelihood."
But doesn't all this require government force, as the Ron Paul folks say? The government has to take money away from some people and distribute it to others.
"So what? The rich are paying the lowest percentage they paid in decades. The corporations are paying the lowest percentage of GDP that they've paid for decades."
But if we level things out, won't we lose the dynamism and the capital accumulation that let us build factories and start new companies?
"They don't build the factories here, anyway! That's the point. They have closed 42,400 factories since 2001. They are coring this country out."
The American workingman is being slaughtered, Trumka says, and the American political class are all accessories. The solution is for unions to be set free. The problem is that to accomplish this, a lot of laws and court rulings have to be repealed. Unions may have only 12 percent of the workforce, but 58 percent say they'd join a union if they could.
Although Trumka has been saying these things for decades, more and more economists are starting to agree with him. This year, the United Nations' annual Trade and Development report said that austerity policies are a "major risk for the global economy" because cutting deficits slows growth, reducing tax receipts and making the deficits bigger. In September, the International Monetary Fund argued that "equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth." The Congressional Budget Office has agreed with him on many things: that last year's health-care-reform law will reduce the deficit, that the Republican austerity budget put forward by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan would increase it, that Obama's proposed jobs bill would in fact create jobs. A recent survey of thirty-four leading economists by Bloomberg News showed that most of them agreed, reporting that Obama's plan would raise the GDP and "add or keep 275,000 workers on payroll" next year. And the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the crash of 2008 hit "right to work" states hardest — five of the ten states with the highest unemployment are in the South, while the more heavily unionized states in the East and Midwest are starting to come back.
His ideas are gaining traction with the public at large as well. "When you tell people you want a millionaire's tax, 80 percent of the people agree. When you say, 'I want a financial-transaction tax, a half a cent on each share that's sold,' more than 80 percent of the people agree. Seventy-eight percent of the American people disagree with our free-trade policy. Go ask them. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, conservatives, rednecks, whoever, go ask them about the trade policy! They agree with us! That it hasn't worked and it hurts this country 'cause it's sucking jobs out of this country! So if 78 percent of the people agree, why do the other 22 percent dominate?
He sounds frustrated.
"Not frustrated," Trumka says. "Determined."
Richard Trumka
(Podium) United Mine Workers of America Archive; (Desk) Rainer Hosch
No one ever knewthat John Sweeney even existed. And can anybody remember a single thing that Lane Kirkland said? Are the Hoffas remembered for anything other than disappearing? American labor leaders, all, anonymous and gray-faced as the share of unionized Americans has slid from 24 percent in 1973 to 12 percent now, and real wages have flatlined. It is perhaps the greatest irony of Richard Trumka's rise to lead American labor that he is perhaps the most articulate and passionate of them all, the only presentable one of the lot, buoyed by this moment of acute distress and the powerful reason of his arguments.
Trumka's story begins sixty-two years ago in Nemacolin, a tiny collection of narrow wood-frame houses bundled by a coal mine an hour south of Pittsburgh. A true company town right out of American legend, Nemacolin was built by the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company in 1917 and promoted nationally as a model industrial town. The company owned the houses and the store and also the police, who carried billy clubs so big the miners' kids used them as baseball bats. When the union organizers started coming, they put a turnstile across the only road and drove them out of town. They set up machine guns on the hills.
Trumka grew up in one of those company houses. He played coal miner with a row of coal wagons his father made out of sardine cans, a Christmas present in one of the lean years. When the family gathered around the Sunday table, the men told coal stories straight out of Matewan or Cabin Creek: how they paid you in script you could only spend at their company store, called for two hundred men when they only needed one hundred, made you pay for your tools and even tosharpen your tools, fired you if you killed a mule but wouldn't even stop the shift when a man died.
When Trumka remembers the past, bottomless family love and dark American history combine in a potent mix. He often recounts a beautiful sunny day when he was twelve and the miners were out on strike, when he was sitting on his grandfather's porch gazing over the Monongahela River a half mile away and the breeze stirred the water and the sun hit the ripples and the sparkles danced back and forth like there was a little diamond on top of each one. He remembers asking his grandfather, "What can I do? What can I do to help the miners?"
"Who you think can help people the most?"
"Politicians?"
His grandfather reached out like he was going to backhand him — never had much faith in politicians. So Trumka thought more and said, "Lawyers."
"That's right. You wanna help miners, get yourself a good education. Coal company can take anything from ya, but they can't take an education away from ya."
But an education cost money. So another bright sunny day a few years later, he came home with big news. "Dad! Dad! I got a job!"
"Ah, that's great son, where'd you get a job at?"
When he answered, his father went quiet and stared off into the distance for a moment, then turned back and looked in his son's eyes. "The day you drop one drop of sweat or lose one drop of blood in that mine, it'll crawl in your soul and you'll never get rid of it."
But his first day in the mine was also the first time he saw his father at work. When he went home that night, his mother asked him what it was like. It was like watching a ballerina dance, he told her. There was no wasted move, it was beautiful and graceful, like that big machine was part of his hand.
Those were uneasy years in the American working class, the era between All in the Family andSaturday Night Fever, when Vietnam veterans and a rebellious new generation began flooding into America's factories and mines. "Union democracy" became the rallying cry as they fought old union systems of bosses and patronage. But this could be dangerous — just two years before Trumka joined the union, United Mine Workers of America chief Tony Boyle sent thugs to kill a reform candidate named Jock Yablonski, who lived just ten miles from Trumka. The killers got Yablonski's wife and daughter, too.
Trumka joined the reformers. Working the midnight shift at the mine, he studied economics at a local college. When he graduated, the union sent him to law school.
"Even allowing for his background, his devotion was just remarkable," remembers John J. Cannon, his favorite professor at Villanova Law. "He believed very deeply in his cause."
When he graduated, Trumka went straight to Washington for a job with Chip Yablonski, Jock's son, who by then ran the UMWA's legal department. Assigned to the team negotiating the 1974 National Bituminous Coal Agreement, Trumka helped push the owners into a groundbreaking pact that one labor expert called the "richest industrial contract ever negotiated."
But the tricky part was selling the contract to the rank and file, still riven by angry Boyle loyalists, and this is where Trumka really shined. The author Tom Geoghegan, who was then a lawyer on the UMWA staff, remembers one particularly tough district in Virginia. "They were loaded for bear, it was the most brutal meeting you could ever imagine, but he could talk to them as a miner and also as a lawyer with a sophisticated conceptual argument."
They won Virginia. "That was when I realized Trumka was going to be somebody in the union movement," Geoghegan says.
After that, Trumka became the legal department's troubleshooter, rushing from crisis to crisis during a period of ridiculous wildcat strikes, when miners struck against studded tires, alternate-day gasoline, and even new public-school textbooks. From Trumka's point of view, the real cause was the slow growth caused by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker's tight-credit austerity policy, but just as globalization was starting to suck jobs overseas, mine owners were getting fed up and rightly so. Trumka thought the answer had to be bigger than collective bargaining and contract negotiations — the modern union had to focus on global social change.
One day he was arguing about these things with the new head of the UMWA, a reformist who wasn't nearly aggressive enough for Trumka, and the union chief blew up at him: "You wanna make policy? Go and get elected. Until that, I'm making policy."
So Trumka wrote out his resignation and slapped it on the boss's desk. "Next time I come back,I'll be making policy."
Then he got in his car and drove back to Nemacolin — back to a job in the coal mines, back to the same mine that left his father sucking on an oxygen tank. This surprised the hell out of his old friends and neighbors, who saw him as one of the lucky ones. "Nobody could understand why he became a lawyer and didn't practice law," says Bob Korchek, the town historian.
Nights and weekends, Trumka used his legal skills to help people get their black-lung money. Didn't charge anybody, says a miner named Drew Cubic. You can still find people in the little houses who are grateful.
During the day, Trumka dug coal. When the next election rolled around, Trumka ran for his district and won eight thousand to eight hundred. Six months after that, he ran for president. "It was an incredibly brave thing," remembers Rick Bank, a senior union lawyer at the time. "First because the odds were heavily against him — nobody thought he could win — and also physically courageous in terms of the history of people who challenged the establishment."
He won by a vote of nearly three to one. His father swore him in, both men weeping.
He was not a conflicted modern man; he didn't indulge in agonies of ambiguity or orgies of self-justification. Did he ever smoke pot as a student in the sixties? "Not once," he says. "I knew that if I did it I'd get caught, and if I got caught it would break my dad's heart."
And why did he go back to working in the coal mine after becoming a big-shot Washington lawyer?
"I had developed a vision of what the union could be, what it should be," he says. "What the labor movement could be. You see the union with all its blemishes and you're able to say that it's still the best vehicle there is for social change."
And that was your vision, social change?
"Absolutely."
Not just a better life for the miners?
"Better world. Better life for everybody, every worker. Poor kids oughta be able to go anyplace their brains will take them. Not where Daddy or Mommy's pocketbooks can send them. Everybody oughta have health care, everybody oughta have some retirement security, every American. Every one. Everybody oughta have a decent good job. That's what I believe in, and that's what I fight every day to try to achieve."
But 1982 was the year Trumka rose to lead the miners, a year after Reagan began his revolution, and he watched as Reagan's new National Labor Relations Board ruled that unions couldn't punish members who cross the picket line or get their jobs back after a strike, told them they couldn't even bring up outsourcing or subcontracting in negotiations. A series of great American companies immediately dumped the unions and hired cheap new workers: Caterpillar, Eastern Airlines, Hormel Foods, International Paper. In the mining union, Trumka beefed up the strike fund and called strikes against Massey Coal and National Mines that turned extraordinarily bitter. Company gunmen shot up a union chief's house and one company security chief was caught with a hit list; union members or unknown sympathizers burned coal trucks, shot a replacement driver in the head and a company president in the leg — none of which was ever linked to Trumka. But he remained defiant as the NLRB ruled against the union again and again, issuing restraining orders and a blizzard of picketing restrictions: "The union, the United Mine Workers, exists in the hearts and minds of the members and their families. And all the money in the world will not eradicate that from our hearts and our minds."
In the end, the union won. But Massey started closing its union mines, and just up ahead loomed the greatest threat of all, and the greatest test of Trumka's character. Early in 1988, the Pittston Corporation announced it was going to cancel health benefits for widows, orphans, and disabled coal miners — an absolute declaration of war. That meant they were prepared to fight to the death.
So Trumka had to wager everything. If he lost, it would be the end of the union and the end of him, too. For a year, the miners worked without a contract while he and his staff planned the strike. Determined to avoid violence this time, Trumka studied Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch's biography of Martin Luther King Jr., sent organizers to train miners in civil disobedience and sit-down strikes, reached out to the AFL-CIO and international unions, and planned a "Camp Solidarity" in the coal fields that would eventually serve forty thousand volunteers from all over the world.
Almost immediately, Pittston staffed the mine with replacement workers and local judges limited the picket lines to fifteen people. An army of private security guards surrounded the strikers with helicopters, guns, and cameras. The governor sent the state police to protect Pittston, not the strikers. The union retaliated with sit-down strikes on public roads and slow convoys of horses or cars to delay coal trucks. The judges fined them for obstructing traffic and banned picketing more than five hundred feet from the mine entrance, banned roving pickets, banned picket lines longer than two hundred feet. When strikers or their sympathizers threw rocks, they fined the union. One judge had union leaders brought to court in handcuffs and leg irons.
On day ninety-eight, union members cut the wire around a coal plant and occupied it like the workers who occupied the shipyard in Poland. Pittston chief Michael Odom denounced Trumka by name as a "common terrorist ... holding us hostage to unlawful ransom."
In June, Trumka led twelve thousand people in a protest in Charleston, South Carolina. Local people began wearing camouflage, the official union fabric, or putting up yellow ribbons in solidarity. At the end of June, Trumka asked for support from outside the union and more than forty thousand miners went on wildcat sympathy strikes from Alabama to Pennsylvania. A caravan of Kentucky miners drove to West Virginia and blockaded coal trucks, their faces hidden by bandannas. On July Fourth, he testified to a crowd of five thousand supporters in Norton, Virginia. In September, 240 religious leaders announced their support of the strikers, with Bishop Walter Sullivan of the Catholic Church in the lead. Students walked out of local high schools, local businesses began to refuse service to the state police.
A local judge began issuing injunctions against the strikers and doubling his fines every day — until they totaled $64 million, a terrifying sum that would have killed the union.
The choice was stark: Submit or defy the law. At the peak of the tension, Trumka gathered his senior staff for a crisis meeting, and he told them, "I can be a union without a treasury, but I can't be a union if all I am is a treasury."
The turning point came the day the judge asked him to talk things over in private, then ordered him to stop giving people strike benefits. "And he said, 'Are you gonna comply with that?'
" 'Nope.'
"He says, 'I'll take your treasury.'
"'Take the fucking treasury. Now what are you gonna fucking do?'"
The way Trumka remembers it, all the expression drained from the judge's face. "That was the most liberating day of my life," he says.
At the other end of all that history, Trumka thinks he sees America clear. "I saw how things really are — they have 'Bosses Row' right there on the main road, and the houses get bigger as they climb the hill. It's still there."
So Trumka has his work cut out for him. In order to fight the pain caused by global capitalism, he has to fight free-market ideology itself. But in order to do that, he has to reverse the many years of conservative legal decisions that have made it almost impossible for unions to organize. Today, a company fighting a union can fire sympathizers and pay a small fine, threaten to close the work site and pay a small fine, stall elections for years at the National Labor Relations Board, reclassify employees as supervisors or independent contractors or simply refuse to accept the union's existence, pay a small fine.
He's made some progress. In 2008, as secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO, Trumka gave a speech on labor and race that got more attention than anything a labor leader had ever said, helping make white working-class males more comfortable voting for a black man. A year later he was elected president and played an important role in the passage of health-care reform, waging a dramatic and successful battle to keep Democrats from taxing employer health plans. He helped direct $50 billion of stimulus money to keep public employees in their jobs. He scored again with a 35 percent tax on Chinese tires, successfully arguing that they were heavily subsidized and had already cost five thousand American jobs. He also reached outside the union, putting more money into an outreach program called Working America that now claims three million members, and making alliances with the promising new quasi-union worker-interest groups for cabdrivers, maids, and day laborers.
After the 2010 elections, he saw what was coming — in the Midwest, incoming Republican governors were coordinating assaults on the ability of public employees to organize — and he began calling other union leaders to prepare a response. "He saw that this would be different than anything we'd ever seen before," says Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. "In terms of the coordination between all these new Republican governors and [right-wing think tank] ALEC, the plan to create voter-ID laws to suppress the vote, it was part of a larger struggle against the social safety net by people who had unlimited resources." One response was a plan to invest $10 billion in union funds in green energy projects, partly to goad Republicans who insist that only private business can create jobs. Another was a union SuperPAC, Trumka's response to the Supreme Court's decision to free corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigns.
"This is a very tough time for working people," says Weingarten, "and you can easily just get angry and say woe is me. And Rich isn't doing that. He is walking right into the fire. And people are walking with him."
Today, the entire city of Dallas seems to be under construction — mostly federal highway money, Trumka points out. "But Rick Perry hates the federal government."
Trumka always bunches as many meetings and speeches as he can into every trip, and today he has three. First thing he's going to do is sign a beam, a pleasure usually saved for mayors and corporate tycoons. "I've never signed a beam before," he says, amused.
The beam sits in a raw construction site that will be the future lobby of Love Field, which is being built as a public-private partnership between Southwest Airlines and the federal government. The CEO of Southwest Airlines is here, also the mayor of Dallas and a pair of eminent Republicans, Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. And here comes Tom Donohue, the silver-haired president of the Chamber of Commerce, whose allies at RedState and the National Right to Work call Trumka an "Orwellian boss" and his followers "union goons" and even accuse him of fomenting murder. But Donohue smiles and extends his hand, and he and Trumka have a friendly shake and hello.
"I called him up a few months ago, we had lunch," Trumka says as Donohue walks away. "He's a great guy."
Why is Trumka here with people who, according to theory and even his extensive personal experience, should be his mortal enemies? Because of jobs. With $82 million in yeast from Washington and a $310 million commitment from Southwest, the Love Field project will create 9,472 jobs — and all that hinges on excellent labor relations with a completely unionized workforce.
On the dais, LaHood is speaking.
"And a special thanks to the workers, who are blessed by having great leadership in Rich Trumka. He is a great leader. He steps up every day and fights for workers."
Then Trumka lines up with the tycoons and Republicans to sign the beam and it's time for item number two on the agenda — over to Southern Methodist University for a jobs conference moderated by Laura Tyson, Bill Clinton's chief economist. Donohue's there too, and the Chamber of Commerce is sounding startlingly Trumkaesque — "There is 30 percent unemployment in the building trades but local governments won't invest in infrastructure unless the feds commit first, so federal funds would immediately put Americans to work."
The last item on his agenda is a meeting of union members from all over Texas, as anxious and pummeled and defiant a group of underdogs as you're ever likely to see. Up on the podium, Trumka seems to be trying to give them a direct transfusion of confidence. "When I hear some of these pseudo-patriots say that America can't afford good jobs anymore, America can't afford job security anymore, America can't afford health care for its citizens, America can't afford pension security anymore, the cap is scaling back on the American dream — when I hear that, I get nauseous! Those people are unpatriotic! They've given up on this country! We haven't given up on this country! We're not gonna stop believing in America! Not today and not tomorrow and not next week and not next month and not next year! Not ever!"
In packed halls, on picket lines, at churches and rallies, he's done this a thousand times, gathering his people with a moral passion that feels distant but familiar, an echo of an older America where common goals still seemed noble and strong, as if by words alone he could summon that era to return. And there's a hint of possibility in the air, as if after all these years of misery and deprivation something might finally have shifted. "And I'll tell you a few other things that we're not gonna do — we're not going to fight defensively to preserve a little bit of a good life for a few of us while the rest of us get worse off year by year by year by year! We're gonna play offense right now, and we're gonna fight for jobs! This is the richest nation on the face of the earth. We deserve better, our kids deserve better, we gotta do better!"
The thing Trumka knows in his bones is the one thing his detractors never understand. It's about taking action, standing up, self-respect, and occasionally saying fuck you just to prove you can. What could be more American than that?
"I don't care how steep the hill! I don't care how long the climb! I don't care how hot the fire! We're starting the march right now, and we won't end until we have an America where every worker can support their family and have some dignity and some retirement security, where every kid gets a chance at a great education and a better way of life!"
And up bursts the audience in a standing ovation. That's what they want to hear! Having spent their lives trying to constellate the Lone Star state, the natural homeland of ornery individualism and gaudy displays of success, they have learned from painful experience that change rarely comes without a fight. Finally someone is nailing it. That's what they say afterward, when the excitement calms down. A ruthlessness stalks this land, a familiar philosophy that admires strength and despises weakness, that divides the world into producers and parasites, creators and moochers, cattle ranchers and sheepherders, and Trumka emerged out of that same stark older America where men clawed in the dirt for a living and the bright line between boss and worker was never forgotten. He seems almost crafted by history to become champion of the underdogs. He will always be the kid who played with the coal wagons made of sardine cans, the man who spent a year planning a strike to save the dignity of his workers, and all of that has finally brought him to the moment he has been preparing for all his life — a fight for the meaning and future of America.
