Richard Trumka hopes to take advantage of the growing frustration with Wall Street and concerns about income inequality to reverse organized labor’s long decline.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO since 2009, speaks with students at Columbia University in Cleveland in November. He faces a big challenge: Union membership has been shrinking, down to 12% of the U.S. workforce from 20% in 1983. (Mark Duncan, Associated Press / November 7, 2011)

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Columbus, Ohio— The future of the labor movement may very well rest in the hands of a man who was sitting over a paper plate piled with spaghetti, amusing his audience by twirling a napkin in his ear, then hamming it up with a wink and a goofy grin that would make any teenager cringe.

He’d been working for 12 hours already, but AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka had every reason to be giddy. Ohioans had just voted down a law that restricted collective bargaining for public workers, and the American labor movement was savoring a rare victory.

“When our members are motivated, when they’re united, no one can turn them around,” Trumka shouted later that night to the raucous crowd that gathered outside the firefighters union hall where Trumka had wolfed down his spaghetti.

Union membership has been shrinking, down from 20% of the U.S. workforce in 1983 to less than 12% today. Union leaders are trying to hang on to one of their last remaining strongholds: government. Strapped for cash, many states are looking to cut costs by ending collective bargaining agreements.

To counter this — and a 2011 Pew poll that showed just 45% of Americans viewed unions favorably — Trumka is going on the offensive, trying to harness frustration with Wall Street and concerns about income inequality to build broader support for labor.

If he succeeds, he will help pro-union Democrats in the Nov. 6 elections and, perhaps, begin to reverse organized labor’s long decline as a political force.

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Protesters at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011, during a demonstration to oppose the governor's bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for many state workers. (AP Photo/Andy Manis)

The uprising of February 2011 made a single word, “Wisconsin,” not just the name of a state but the reference point for a renewal of labor militancy, mass protest and radical politics. But it did something else. It signaled that a new generation of young Americans would not just reject the lie of austerity. They would lead a fight-back that has extended from the Capitol in Madison to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and across the United States.

John Nichols

A remarkable transition has happened since Wisconsinites occupied their streets and their Capitol. Progressives have moved from despair to hope. Not to victory, but to a sense of possibility. That is the radical progress that students, young workers, rockers and rappers demanded from a political process too prone to cynicism and surrender—and it is the radical change they have made. To understand how radical, consider where things began.

Governor Scott Walker, a Republican narrowly elected in the GOP sweep of 2010, proposed just weeks after taking office to strip teachers and other public sector workers of the collective bargaining rights and union representation that provide the last thin layers of protection in an era of globalization, privatization, downsizing and deep cuts. The governor and his party had the upper hand, with control of both houses of the state legislature, a dysfunctional Democratic opposition, weakened unions, a pliant press and a right-wing machine funded by billionaires like Charles and David Koch.

By the estimate of most pundits, even those who sympathized generally with labor and specifically with the Democratic Party, defeating the governor’s project was a hopeless struggle. But someone forgot to tell the students. Days after Walker’s announcement, 1,000 members and supporters of the Teaching Assistants’ Association at the University of Wisconsin—the oldestgraduate employee union in the world—gathered at the Capitol to raise handmade signs and teeth-chattering voices in protest.

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