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LINK to AFL-CIO
Website
The AFL-CIO is governed by a
quadrennial convention at which all federation members are
represented by elected delegates of their unions. Convention
delegates set broad policies and goals for the union movement
and every four years elect the AFL-CIO officers—the president,
secretary-treasurer, executive vice president and 43 vice
presidents.
These
officers make up the AFL-CIO Executive Council, which guides the
daily work of the federation. An AFL-CIO General Board includes
the Executive Council members, a chief officer of each
affiliated union and the trade and industrial departments
created by the AFL-CIO constitution and four regional
representatives of the state federations. The General Board
takes up matters referred to it by the Executive Council, which
traditionally include endorsements of candidates for U.S.
president and vice president.
Richard L.
Trumka, AFL-CIO President
“If you want to help workers, you first need
to help people.”
On September 16, 2009, Richard L. Trumka was elected President of the
AFL-CIO by acclamation at the Federation’s 26th convention in
Pittsburgh, Pa. His election, following 15 years of service as the
AFL-CIO’s Secretary Treasurer, capped Trumka’s rise to leadership of the
nation’s largest labor federation from humble beginnings in the small
coal mining communities of southwest Pennsylvania.
Twelve-year-old Richard Louis Trumka was sitting on the porch of his
grandfather Attilio Bertugli’s house in Rices Landing, Pa., complaining
bitterly to his grandpap about how badly Mine Workers were being
treated. It was the 1960s, and the miners were on strike.
“What do you plan to do about it?” his grandfather asked.
“When I grow up, I could be a politician,” Rich replied. His grandpap
feigned smacking him across the back of his head. Chastened, young
Trumka offered a second opinion: “I could become a lawyer and stand up
for workers’ rights.”
His grandfather, a long-time miner, allowed how that was a better idea,
but added something that has stuck with Trumka ever since. “If you want
to help workers,” his grandfather said, “you first need to help people.”
Rich Trumka not only grasped the wisdom of his grandfather’s counsel, it
has been the encompassing vision of his leadership in the labor movement
ever since: Unions must strive to uplift everybody in their pursuit of
fair treatment for workers, as they did in building the world’s
strongest middle class, and as they must once again by leveling the
playing field and restoring job growth and prosperity for working
people.
“The mines humble man”
Born July 24, 1949, Trumka grew up in the Pennsylvania coalfields during
the ’60s. Like many of his generation living in his community, his
prospects coming out of high school were “steel, auto, the mines or the
military.” Rich followed his grandfather Attilio and his father, Frank,
into the mines. They proved worse than he had imagined: “Cold, damp,
dusty – sound bouncing all around,” he recounts. “A dungeon of impending
danger.”
His grandfather and father, both of whom were union activists, offered
him advice he hadn’t anticipated, either. They told him that in return
for demanding the right to be respected, you owed your employer a full
day’s hard work.
Working side by side at times with his father, he witnessed the family’s
work ethic put into practice. Frank Trumka was highly regarded by his
co-workers for his astute judgment and tireless work ethic, once setting
a long-standing record for filling the most coal cars in a single shift.
He worked with the utmost efficiency, Rich recalls, “with movements as
graceful as a ballet dancer.”
Rich worked in the mines for more than seven years, working his way
through Penn State University, where he graduated in 1971 with a
Bachelor of Science degree, and eventually got a law degree from
Villanova University in 1974. He worked on the legal staff of the United
Mine Workers for four years before returning to mine work in 1979, doing
pro bono legal work for local families in the Nemacolin area during his
hours away from the mine.
In his years working underground, the hazards of mining exposed Trumka
to lessons beyond his imagination, experiences that shaped him far more
than his academic or legal pursuits.
“The mines humble man,” he says. “I’ve been in near death, disastrous
situations.” He saw his father, who spent 44 years as a miner,
spontaneously take charge of a rescue operation of a man after a
near-disastrous cave-in. It was in moments like these that Rich learned
the true meaning of solidarity.
“Our lives depended on each other”
The enduring lesson that Rich Trumka learned in the mines is that people
need each other. “You learn dependence,” he says. “You work in common.
Your lives revolve around each other. You experience the vulnerability
of all mankind because of the power of nature.”
In short, you learn that solidarity is more than a galvanizing
principle; it’s a necessity.
“You also learn about employers,” he adds. “You learn that some of them
care more about a lump of coal than an individual’s life.”
Rich Trumka’s blood knowledge of solidarity’s significance and the need
to challenge corporate indifference have proved the twin engines driving
his many successes throughout his years as a labor leader.
“My grandfather’s proudest moment”
Once back at work in the mining community, Trumka’s leadership shone. He
rose quickly through the ranks, first serving as chair of UMWA Local
6290’s safety committee and later on the union’s International Executive
Board. Rich had always admired Mine Worker reformer Jock Yablonski, who
was murdered in 1969, along with his wife and daughter, victims of the
fractious and sometimes violent feuds in the UMWA that Trumka was
hell-bent on ending.
Undaunted by the violence earlier visited on Yablonski, Trumka took up
the reformers’ mantel and led a reform slate in 1982. At 33, he was
elected the UMWA’s youngest president. His grandfather Bertugli had
passed away by then, a source of deep regret for Trumka, who muses, “It
would have been my grandfather’s proudest moment.”
Trumka was sworn into office by his father. Straightaway, he set about
reforming the Mine Workers’ fractious bureaucracy. He understood the
strength of a unified union possessed for projecting a powerful voice on
issues. As president of UMWA he led one of the most successful strikes
in recent American history against the Pittston Coal Company, which
tried to avoid paying into an industry-wide health and pension fund.
Breaking with decades of tradition, his consistent use of non-violent
civil disobedience led to his being given the Labor Responsibility Award
from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in
1990.
Following his grandfather’s counsel to always help people, Rich became
an early supporter of the civil rights and anti apartheid movements, and
continues to challenge prejudice in whatever form it takes. He mobilized
international support by building alliances with miners in Australia,
South Africa, Europe and Scandanavia and other countries to join the
union’s fight. Trumka pioneered the use of strategic comprehensive
campaigns by unions—building coalitions and alliances with other unions
and nonprofit advocacy groups to strengthen the Mine Worker’s cause and
reaching out to Wall Street investors. Ultimately, he overcame hundreds
of millions in federal court-ordered fines against the union to win the
Pittston coal strike, and then doggedly appealed the fines until the
U.S. Supreme Court finally overruled them.
Over time, his successes built on one another. In the course of his UMWA
three-term presidency, Trumka:
Won passage of the federal COAL Act that provides guaranteed health care
for retired miners;
Brought the UMWA into the AFL-CIO;
Mobilized support to win a contract for 18,000 miners forced out on
strike for seven months by BCOA; and,
Established an office that rallied support among mineworkers for the
anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. He also served as the U.S.
Shell Oil boycott chairman, which challenged the company for its
business dealings in South Africa.
By his third term as president of the Mine Workers in 1995, Trumka’s
record of activism, innovation and reform was firmly established and
well known to AFL-CIO union presidents.
A New Reform Insurgency
When an insurgent group of union presidents that year chose SEIU
president John Sweeney to challenge Lane Kirkland for the AFL-CIO
presidency, Rich Trumka was their obvious choice to run as
Secretary-Treasurer on the Sweeney ticket. Their reasoning was based on
the breadth of Trumka’s appeal to the labor movement and beyond.
Trumka’s credentials as a reformer and tough negotiator complemented
Sweeney’s considerable record of organizing success at SEIU. More than a
decade younger, Trumka added industrial bargaining clout to Sweeney’s
public-sector credentials.
His record as a unifier who had restored the Mine Workers to the fold at
the AFL-CIO, and as a formidable adversary of renegade corporate
behavior, lent credibility to the insurgents’ call for revitalizing the
federation. And his widely acknowledged rhetorical gift for inspiring
activism paired neatly with Sweeney’s skill as a union diplomat and
administrator.
Trumka also strengthened the ticket’s appeal to young and minority
workers as a result of his civil and human rights leadership. His role
in forging U.S. mineworker solidarity with the mineworkers of South
Africa while they were fighting racial apartheid had been hailed beyond
the labor community in 1990, when he received the Letelier-Moffitt Human
Rights Award – evidence of bold leadership that presaged his speech
during the Obama presidential campaign condemning voters subsumed by
racial prejudice.
Combating Reckless Capital
When the Sweeney-Trumka ticket won at the 1995 convention, Rich became
the youngest Secretary- Treasurer in AFL-CIO history.
He soon carved out a unique and innovative leadership role, creating
investment programs for the pension and benefit funds of the labor
movement and fighting excessive corporate profits. He urged creation of,
and chairs, the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council, a consortium of
manufacturing unions focusing on key issues in trade, health care and
labor law reform.
A member of the AFL-CIO Executive Council since 1989, Trumka was
instrumental in developing tactics to rally the support of international
labor on behalf of U.S. workers struggling for workplace justice against
multinational conglomerates. He also served on the executive boards of
the International Miners’ Federation and the ICFTU and played a key role
in organizing a new global coalition of coal miners’ unions in five
countries.
Rich further strengthened his hand as an outspoken opponent of an
unregulated trading regime that is undermining good-paying American jobs
by becoming co-chair of the China Currency Coalition, an alliance of
industry, agriculture, services and worker organizations supporting U.S.
manufacturing.
Trumka chairs the AFL-CIO’s Strategic Approaches Committee, charged with
assisting affiliated unions that seek assistance in achieving their
strategic goals through collective bargaining. He also chairs the
AFL-CIO Finance Committee and the AFL-CIO Capital Stewardship Committee,
which works to ensure workers’ deferred wages are wisely invested to
provide the best long-term benefits to America’s working families.
The Power of Fearless Convictions
During the 2008 presidential race, Rich Trumka’s penchant for bold
leadership reemerged. Polls early on in the general election showed a
close race, but failed to reveal what Trumka was witnessing in trips
home to Nemacolin and across the country: an underlying resistance to
voting for Obama, driven by thinly veiled racial prejudice, particularly
among older voters, many of them staunch labor supporters.
Rich was convinced such prejudice needed to be confronted. The
conventional wisdom in Washington advised against it as too risky and
potentially inflammatory. Rich concluded that silence in the face of
such repulsive prejudice ran the risk of inadvertently empowering it.
So on July 1, 2008, at the Steelworkers International convention,
inspired by the belief that “all that is required for evil to triumph is
for good people to do nothing,” Trumka delivered a stem-winding speech
attacking the latent racism that threatened Obama’s candidacy.
“There’s no evil,” he trumpeted, “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. Because we know
better than anybody how racism is used to divide working people.”
The speech proved electrifying, both literally and figuratively,
evincing a rising tide of applause from the 3,000 delegates in the hall.
A video excerpt posted on YouTube has attracted more than a half-million
viewers, strong evidence that Trumka’s uncompromising convictions in the
face of age-old prejudices had rung the bell with a younger generation
of voters.
The emerging generation of workers is the most diverse in the nation’s
history, but it has in common a regard for the no-nonsense candor so
characteristic of Trumka, yet so often lacking among today’s leaders,
whether in business or in politics.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, believes that Rich’s
straight-from-the-shoulder convictions will appeal greatly to this new
generation of workers, many of whom feel estranged from the
establishment.
“If Rich feels that workers are being wronged,” she says, “he will speak
truth to power, because he feels it’s more important to do what’s right
for workers than to be on the right side of the political
establishment.”
A New Generation of Unionism
The same sense of injustice that animated outrage in 12-year-old Rich
Trumka over the lousy treatment of miners is evident today in Trumka’s
expressed outrage over the economic raw deal being foisted on a new
generation of workers.
In announcing his candidacy to succeed John Sweeney as president of the
AFL-CIO, Trumka pledged to go on a nationwide “listening tour” to learn
first-hand what younger workers think about unions and how to make the
labor movement more relevant to their lives.
“I’m convinced,” he said, “that if we sit down and begin to actually
listen to what young workers are saying, we can find ways to earn their
support.”
It was a conviction firmly expressed in addressing a recent group of
graduating seniors at Cornell University, whom Trumka urged to “assert
your beliefs with absolute conviction.
“As you do, others will see the value of stepping out from the crowd and
challenging what’s all-to-often called ‘conventional wisdom.’ So assert
your beliefs – with absolute conviction. And as you do, I believe you’ll
find, as I have through the years, that inspiration is contagious – that
other voices will be raised in support of your beliefs.
“And from your collective vision will come a new generation of leaders
who will change things for the better – a generation that will stand up
for its beliefs, and stand down those who blindly resist change.”
A New Day for Working America
A change in the economic pecking order was the centerpiece of Trumka’s
message in kicking off his campaign for the presidency of the AFL-CIO.
“In this economy, still manipulated by Wall Street, many Americans are
struggling to have decent jobs with security and to simply survive.
Unions are more important than ever because we speak up for the
disadvantaged,” Trumka said. “We can make their voice heard.”
He pledged to engage workers in a bottom-up effort to strengthen unions,
and to reach out to women and minorities to make the labor movement a
reflection of the nation’s evolving workforce. “It’s the voice of
workers that unions represent, and I promise I will be a good listener.
The best ideas and activism bubble up from the grassroots.”
“This campaign will extend beyond the convention in September,” Trumka
added. “We will carry our fight to win basic rights and new
opportunities for working Americans into next year and beyond. It’s time
that workers got a fair shake for a change, and America’s unions are
going to be on the front lines of winning it.”
Building an Opportunity Society
Richard Trumka’s record of innovation and assertion, coupled with his
commitment to reunify the splintered labor movement as he once did the
fractious UMWA, has won him widespread support among leaders
representing everyone from blue-collar workers to white-collar
professionals.
“Rich Trumka has demonstrated his courage as a trade unionist throughout
his career,” says Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation
of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). “He has terrific
leadership skills. He knows the inner workings of labor, and will be
forceful and aggressive in strengthening the voice of America’s working
families.”
Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, the nation’s
largest industrial union, cites Trumka’s “ intellectual capacity to do
the job,” as well as his “great heart and passion to fight for issues
that matter to America’s working families.”
Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of the 80,000-member California
Nurses Association (CNA/NNOC) hails Trumka as “a bold, strategic, and
fighting leader whose passion for working people and social change are
especially needed in this critical juncture.”
Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) president Mike Langford calls
Trumka “a visionary trade unionist who speaks with honest conviction and
power about building a society with real opportunity for all Americans.”
“Rich Trumka is a labor leader for our times,” says James Williams,
president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades. “No
one else today speaks with the passion, and the intelligence, about an
economy that is not working for working people. No one else has the
experience and the personal fortitude necessary to bring unions together
for the benefit of us all.
Remarkably consistent praise, for a remarkably consistent record of
principled leadership.
Trumka has a sister, Frances Szellar. He and his wife Barbara (nee
Vidovich) have a son, Richard, Jr., who is a 2006 graduate of the
Cornell University School of Industrial Relations and a 2009 graduate of
Georgetown University Law School.
Elizabeth H.
Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer
A Passion to Get Things Done
Elizabeth “Liz” Shuler became the first woman ever elected
Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO when she was voted into office by
acclamation at the Federation’s 26th convention on September 16, 2009.
Ms. Shuler also became the youngest officer ever elected, rising through
the ranks from her first union position in Local 125 of the IBEW in
Portland, Ore.
From her earliest days on the job in Portland, Liz displayed a
commitment to excellence and professionalism that helped her succeed in
all she undertook, often against daunting odds.
When the Enron corporation tried to use its financial clout in 1997 to
muscle electricity deregulation through the Oregon state legislature, it
ran into an unexpected challenge. The challenge came from Elizabeth
Shuler, then the 27-year-old state legislative and political director
for Local 125 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).
To combat Enron’s assault on the state’s system of regulated
electricity, Liz (as she’s known to her friends and co-workers) worked
with a broad-based coalition of labor, community and environmental
activists to challenge, and ultimately overcome, Enron’s powerhouse
lobbying campaign, a victory that she says, “sparked my passion for
advocating for people through political and legislative activism –
especially in the energy fights.”
At 34, she was the highest-ranking woman in the IBEW, serving as the
executive assistant to International President Edwin D. Hill, and now
holds the second-highest position in the labor movement – AFL-CIO
Secretary-Treasurer.
To this day, taking on Enron gives her special satisfaction. Her father,
Lance, a long-time Local 125 member who worked for Portland General
Electric, as did her late mother, Joyce, was one of the PGE workers hit
hardest when they lost their pensions because of Enron’s reckless buyout
of the Oregon energy company, and one of thousands who were
disenfranchised nationwide when Enron went belly up.
Building Mobilizing Prowess
Only a few years before, Shuler’s success in challenging Enron might not
have been possible. Newly graduated from the University of Oregon with a
degree in journalism, Liz says, “I was the McJob woman.” Similar to many
young people today, she had a number of part-time jobs to make ends
meet. Not sure where she was going to find full time employment, she
built experience as a political activist working for a firm that
coordinated political events, before joining Local 125 in 1993.
A summer job in the payroll department at PGE during college had shown
her how the nonunion clerical workers were disadvantaged, compared with
their unionized counterparts. She had begun talking with her coworkers
about organizing that summer, because she knew that the line department
workers, like her father, had better benefits by being in the union.
Now, as a member and full-time employee of the local union, she was
thrust into a full-fledged campaign to organize the clerical workers.
The organizers on staff at the local were all men, so Liz was assigned
to house calling mostly women employees, because she “looked like them”
and they could relate to her more closely. “Those were challenging
times,” she recalls. “The company was holding captive audience meetings
and people were scared, so it was really tough to even get into their
homes.”
The organizing experience taught Liz that the local union needed to
build mobilizing capacity if it were to become more effective
politically and legislatively. She traveled across the local’s
multistate jurisdiction conducting Construction Organizing Membership
Education and Training (COMET) and Membership Education and Mobilization
for Organizing (MEMO) courses for each of the 5,000-member local’s 36
different bargaining units. She developed a political education course;
formed local networks to bolster the union’s PAC, doubling the member
contributions annually; built a chain of activists throughout the
local’s five-state territory; and engaged the PAC board in a formal
candidate endorsement process for the first time.
It took her a few years to build a program and the trust of the older,
more established leaders in the local union. “They’d never worked with
someone like me on a peer level before,” she recalls. “When you’re
young, blonde and female, some people make certain assumptions, so
you’re always battling those assumptions.”
Battling the Odds
When she arrived on the scene, 70 percent of union members in California
were supporting Prop. 226. Shuler worked tirelessly to educate members
in the IBEW’s 40 locals across the state about the disastrous
consequences Prop. 226 would create. On Election Day, more than 70
percent of IBEW’s members voted against the proposition, and it was
soundly defeated. Armed with a strong mobilization program, and Liz’s
hard work to implement it throughout the state, the losing trend was
upturned and the vote was completely reversed among IBEW members!
Praiseworthy Performance
IBEW local leaders showered Liz’s work on Prop. 226 with kudos. “This
lady is a real go-getter,” San Francisco Local 6 reported. Local 428 in
Bakersfield wrote that Shuler “appeared to be in three different places
at one time.”In recognition of her stellar work, the IBEW International
Office offered Liz a job in Washington, D.C., where she served for six
years as an International Representative in the Political/Legislative
Affairs Department. In that job, she used her background and experience
as a political organizer with a knack for policy detail and legislative
procedure to lobby on issues such as energy and electricity,
telecommunications, Davis-Bacon, health care, transportation,
apprenticeship and training, pension reform, unemployment and
telecommunications.
She continued to hone her political skills on campaigns in the field, as
statewide coordinator for IBEW’s efforts to defeat “paycheck deception”
measures 92 and 98 in Oregon in 2000. Just days after defeating both
initiatives, she was sent to Florida to assist with the presidential
recount in West Palm Beach. She trained pools of observers daily, to
make sure every legitimate vote was counted.
Rewarding Experience
Few labor leaders have such wide experience with different workforces –
from blue collar to white collar to pink collar and now green collar,
from manufacturing and service sector to professional. As executive
assistant to the International President, Shuler oversaw the work and
budgeting of eleven departments of the IBEW, including Utility,
Manufacturing, Telecommunications, Broadcasting and Government, as well
as Education, Research, Political/Legislative Affairs, Human Services,
Media and Safety.
Besides advising President Hill on major policy issues, she managed the
IBEW green jobs initiative, the planning and construction of the IBEW
museum, a training partnership with the Panamanian government, sexual
harassment/diversity training and electronic tracking systems for
political contribution requests and for “Code of Excellence”
implementation and accountability, among other projects.
She is especially proud of her work on the IBEW’s Code of Excellence, a
program adopted by Hill in 2005 to renew union members’ pride in
workmanship and guarantee to employers that workers were committed to a
hard day’s work for a full day’s pay.
“If we’re going to rebuild the labor movement we need to start with a
commitment to quality work, to show that union labor makes a difference
not only for the workers and their families, but also for our
employers,” she said. “Unions add value, and the IBEW is demonstrating
how this value-added translates to new jobs and new members.”
Liz is active with many women’s causes. She is a member of the boards of
the Women’s Campaign Fund, a bipartisan fundraising organization that
aims to boost the number of women holding public office, and Women’s
Policy, Inc., the caucus organization for women members of Congress. For
several years she volunteered with the International Women’s Democracy
Center, an organization that sponsors mentoring programs encouraging
women to run for office and seek change in countries overseas.
She has been active with the American Council of Young Political
Leaders, which brings emerging leaders under age 40 to the United
States, a program to which Liz has succeeded in building a stronger
labor component.
Liz is deeply committed to the Trumka Team’s call to renew labor’s
appeal to younger people. “We have to change the perception of unions,”
she says. “We need to figure out how to make unions “cool” again and
reconnect with people where they live. We’re about community. We’re
about people helping each other.”
Liz lives with her husband David Herbst in Washington, D.C.
Arlene Holt
Baker, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President
Undying Activism
Arlene Holt Baker’s outstanding leadership since being appointed to
replace retired AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez Thompson
was rewarded with election by acclamation to serve a full term in the
office by delegates to the AFL-CIO’s 26th convention on September 16,
2009.
Arlene’s commitment to activism on behalf of working families has been a
source of strength that has empowered her to overcome challenges and
disappointments that might have deterred a leader of lesser mettle.
As a grade schooler in Ft. Worth, Texas, Arlene Holt Baker revered
President John F. Kennedy. So she was thrilled that her mother got her
released from school to travel to the parking lot across the street from
the Texas Hotel where she heard Kennedy speak briefly before heading off
in his motorcade.
“There was so much hope vested there,” Arlene recalls. “Because we had a
president who believed in making things better.” Arlene was back in
school by noon, where she heard over the intercom that President Kennedy
had been shot. “By the time I got to geography class, they announced he
was dead.” It was November 22, 1963.
Were hope the only thing Arlene had to draw on, she might never have
risen through the ranks of the American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees (AFSCME) as a grassroots organizer and area director
for California to become the first African-American Executive Vice
President of the AFL-CIO. President Kennedy’s death was not the only
tragedy that dashed her hopes in those early years.
There was her father’s death in an automobile accident in 1968, Martin
Luther King’s assassination that same year, and Robert Kennedy’s
assassination not long after.
Inspired To Serve Others
What caused Arlene to persevere through it all was the belief that
helping others is a person’s highest calling, a conviction inspired by
her mother, Georgia Louise Leslie, a domestic worker who never let
Arlene and her six brothers and sisters dwell on the fact that “we
didn’t have much. She would always remind us that others were worse off.
She sacrificed to pay her poll tax, her church tithe and her NAACP dues,
and she really believed in volunteerism.”
Throughout Arlene Holt Baker’s more than 30 years as a union and
grassroots organizer, she has put her mother’s inspiration to work
helping others help themselves through union representation and
political activism.
As an organizer for clerical employees for the City of Los Angeles, she
“learned what it really was to empower people,” she says. “Economic
empowerment occurs through collective bargaining and having a voice at
work.”
She shares with AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka a commitment to inspiring
a new generation of union activism. “The future of the labor movement,”
she says, “is young people. Our workforce today is dynamic – younger,
more diverse, more people of color. The only way to grow a movement that
has the strength that we had in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties is to
tap into the energy and cultures of the emerging workforce.”
Arlene will build on her legacy of inspiring activism and reaching out
to diverse communities to support the needs and aspirations of working
people.
Organizing Activism
Holt Baker got her first job in high school through President Lyndon
Johnson’s poverty initiative. Working after school at the $1.40-an-hour
minimum wage, she made more than the $6 a day that her mother earned as
a full time domestic worker.
She began her work in the labor movement with AFSCME in Los Angeles in
June 1972, coincidentally in the same month that William Lucy took
office as AFSCME’s Secretary-Treasurer, the first African-American to
hold one of that union’s top offices.
Seeing his picture being put up in AFSCME’s Los Angeles office, her
undying optimism was reinforced.
“I felt somehow that it was destiny to be there with an organization
that believed in social and economic justice.”
She moved through the ranks of AFSCME and, as an organizer and
international union representative, was successful in helping to
organize public-sector workers in California and helping them win
contracts that provided better wages and pay equity for women.
Rewarding Results
Visiting some of these workplaces years later, she saw how having a
union contract had “given women the opportunity to buy first homes,
first autos, to send their kids to college. It was uplifting.”
As AFSCME’s international union area director in California from the
late 1980s to 1995, Arlene worked with AFSCME councils, locals, labor
councils and allies advocating for working families.
During that time, she was appointed by then-California Speaker of
Assembly Willie L. Brown Jr. to serve on the Comparable Worth Task Force
Committee and also sat on the board of directors of the Southern
California Industrial Relations Research Association. She has received
numerous civic awards for her work as a labor and community advocate.
Political Activism
Also in California, she helped run AFSCME’s political activities,
working with AFSCME council and local leaders to mobilize union voters
in numerous national, statewide, county and municipal elections.
She was an active member of the California Democratic Party, serving as
a state delegate to the Democratic National Convention for the elections
held between 1980 and 1996 and as first vice chair of the state
Democratic Party from 1993 to 1996.
In 1995, Arlene came to the AFL-CIO as executive assistant to Executive
Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. Working in 1998 for the first time
with current AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer candidate Liz Shuler, Arlene’s
successes included the campaign to defeat the anti-worker California
Prop. 226, which was designed to weaken the voices of union members in
the political process. She also was instrumental in organizing labor’s
massive support for the more than 20,000 migrant workers who pick and
process strawberries in California, as the workers struggled to join a
union through the Farm Workers.
Community Activism
As Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO, Holt Baker became the
first director of the AFL-CIO Voice@Work campaign in 1999. Holt Baker
launched a dynamic movement to engage elected officials, clergy members,
community leaders and others in support of workers’ freedom to form
unions. In 2000, she ran the federation’s member education and
get-out-the-vote effort in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and later
coordinated the AFL-CIO’s Count Every Vote activity in the Florida
recount.
Beginning in 2004, Arlene served as president of the nonpartisan voter
education and mobilization effort Voices for Working Families, which
registered and mobilized thousands of women and people of color to vote
in under-registered communities.
She returned to the federation in 2006 to lead the AFL-CIO’s Gulf Coast
Recovery effort. That work has included partnering with the AFL-CIO
Housing Investment Trust’s Gulf Coast Revitalization Program and the
Building Trades Gulf Coast Pilot Project to bring affordable housing and
good jobs to people in the region – working closely with national and
local advocates in fighting for the just rebuilding of the Gulf region.
On September 21, 2007, Arlene Holt Baker was unanimously approved to
fill out the term of retiring Executive Vice President Linda
Chavez-Thompson, becoming the first African American to be elected to
one of the federation’s three highest offices.
Serving as Executive Vice President of the AFL-CIO, Holt Baker continues
to use her voice and her platform to advocate for the rights of workers
to organize, health care reform, fair trade, immigrant rights, LGBT
rights, voting rights, and the right for all union members to be able to
fully participate in democratic unions that reflect the rich diversity
of the workplace.
Renewed Hope
Arlene Holt Baker had the audacity to keep hope alive in the face of
tragedy long before Barack Obama was elected president. With him in
office, she now hopes to help lead a renewal of the labor movement.
“We have the opportunity right now to ring in a new day for working
people, especially women, people of color, the young, and all of those
who have been shut out of the middle class by Wall Street,” she says.
“With the Trumka team, we have the chance to bring new energy and new
approaches to the challenges we face – to be as dynamic as possible in
engaging young people and today’s diverse workforce at every level of
our movement.”
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