Labor Movement Must Be Broad, Inclusive, Innovative Worker-driven Organization...
Mike Hall
The future of the union movement, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler told some 600 members of the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee (LCC), depends on showing the public that through our actions on the ground we are a: broad, inclusive, innovative worker-driven organization….We need to build a broader, stronger, more effective movement for all working people—union and nonunion. That means organizing. It means advocacy. It means grassroots mobilization.
Shuler said the AFL-CIO’s young worker initiative, Next Up, is "connecting with the next generation of union activists, engaging them, activating them, helping bring them into leadership, making sure union policies and priorities reflect the realities young people face in the workplace today.”
So many of the Next Up generation can’t find jobs at all, and when they do, they’re often in nontraditional work arrangements—freelancing in benefit-free, low-paying “gigs.” But the AFL-CIO, our affiliates and labor councils are helping young people set up young worker groups all across the country, and the LCC does a fantastic job mentoring young lawyers.
Speaking at the group’s annual meeting in Chicago this morning, Shuler pointed to the AFL-CIO’s “Work Connects Us All” outreach initiatives in Austin, Texas, Portland, Ore., and Pittsburgh, Pa.
As part of this new effort, a comedy show in Portland with Laughing Liberally and a demonstration supporting the city’s cab drivers “took the Portland community by surprise—and they liked us.”
In our everyday work, we have to show that Unions are working people, not outside institutions.
She also said the union movement continues to connect with nonunion workers and families through the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America and by working closely with: Nontraditional and even excluded workers—like the immigrant taxi workers in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco who have formed the AFL-CIO’s newest union, and the domestic workers and day laborers who are organizing, and the low-wage immigrant carwash workers in Los Angeles who now have access to health care through collective action.
She also praised the work of the LCC for “being the guardian angels of the 99 percent.”
I know that your work is not a job—it’s a calling. You are not just excellent lawyers, whose legal skills help workers and their unions, day in and day out. You are activists and advisers, educators and mobilizers—protecting the right to vote on Election Day, protecting the rights of the Occupy protesters, leading teach-ins. Working people and the labor movement are fortunate to know that the lawyers of the LCC have our back.
