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RICHARD L. TRUMKA AND UNITE HERE: A REMEMBRANCE
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HON. ROSA L. DeLAURO
of connecticut
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
Ms. DeLAURO. Madam Speaker, I rise to include in the Record a statement written by John W. Wilhelm, Retired President, UNITE HERE, in honor of the late Rich Trumka.
UNITE HERE had a special bond with Rich Trumka. His unexpected death this month hit the labor movement hard. It was a personal loss for me, and the loss of a passionate advocate for the members of our Union.
Rich Trumka was a leader of principle and courage. He was a third generation coal miner from immigrant Italian and Polish stock, growing up in the little Appalachian coal town of Nemacolin in southwest Pennsylvania.
His Union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), is one of the most important Unions--arguably the single most important--in American labor history. The UMWA was founded in 1890, one year before HERE. The UMWA has always been important to its fiercely loyal members, working for brutal companies in a dangerous industry. It was equally important to the American labor movement because the UMWA was the driving force in the creation of the CIO and the massive industrial organizing campaigns of the Great Depression, as well as a crucial political ally for President Roosevelt and the New Deal.
My mother, who grew up in the coal country of Southwest Virginia, always said that the only good things that ever happened to the Appalachian people were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the United Mine Workers.
After the legendary Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis retired in 1960. the Union lost its way. Rich Trumka went to Penn State, intending to play football until he got hurt, and then the Villanova Law School. Rich could have done anything, but he decided to become part of a growing reform movement in the UMWA. After the murder of reform leader Jock Yablonski, Rich redoubled his efforts. In 1982, at age 33, he was elected President of his Union.
Rich set out to restore the confidence of the miners in their Union, and to restore the Union's hard-earned respect from the coal companies. His rebuilding program culminated in the epic 10-month strike of 2,000 Union miners against the Pittston Coal Company in 1989-1990. Pittston was a creative campaign, with the mine workers' trademark militant picket lines backed up by massive, repeated civil disobedience, strategic corporate and political action, and determined support from women organized as the Daughters of Mother Jones.
My predecessor as HERE General President, Edward T. Hanley, supported Rich Trumka from the time Rich became President of UMWA. During the Pittston strike, Edward saw a CNN report that Pittston had put on a lobster dinner for the scabs, outdoors where the pickets could see the scabs eating. That angered Edward. He told Rich that the company fed the scabs once, but HERE would feed the strikers every day. He sent five cooks who were members of HERE Local 863 at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia to Camp Solidarity in Castlewood, Virginia, the strike headquarters. The Greenbrier HERE members prepared three meals a day, seven days a week, until the strikers won.
The key issue in the strike was retiree health care. Pittston unilaterally gutted the health benefits of its retirees, and refused to pay into the health care fund for retired miners who had been employed by other companies that had gone out of business.
Rich told me that Ed Hanley's help was crucial to settling the Pittston strike. During the AFL-CIO Convention in 1989 in Washington DC, Edward invited Rep. Daniel Rostenkowski, his life-long Chicago friend who was then Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to meet in the bar at the Sheraton Wardman Park Hotel, site of the Convention, and asked Rich to join them. By the wee hours of the next morning, Rich, Edward, and Rep. Rostenkowski shook hands on the framework to settle the Pittston strike.
The strike continued full force, but the Sheraton Wardman Park framework succeeded. Pittston reluctantly agreed to pay for retirement security for its own current and future employees and their spouses. The UMWA strikers triumphantly returned to work.
For the retirees from other companies for whom the strikers had also been fighting, Dan Rostenkowski promised Rich Trumka and Ed Hanley that Congress would step in to help. Bob Juliano, HERE's peerless Legislative Representative, worked with the UMWA and the Congressman's staff to structure the solution. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, sponsored legislation which required that all coal companies pay the retirement costs of their own retirees and spouses. It also guaranteed Federal funding of benefits for ``orphan'' retirees, those whose employers had gone out of business. Congress passed this landmark legislation, and President George H.W. Bush signed it in 1992.
It was the Pittston strike that solidified an enduring bond between HERE and the United Mine Workers. The good turn that our Union did for Rich Trumka and the UMWA has been repaid many times over in the intervening years.
Rich Trumka found in HERE three things he admired: workers with the bravery and tenacity to fight for justice, a Union courageous enough to take on strikes that like Pittston seemed impossible, and a Union that organizes and fights for immigrant workers.
The Culinary and Bartenders Union in Las Vegas was our Union's largest affiliate in the 1980's, and it still is. By 1990 the Culinary and Bartenders had made progress in rebuilding after the terrible 1984 Las Vegas strike, but two tough obstacles loomed.
The first was a brutal 9-month strike in 1990 at the Horseshoe in Downtown Las Vegas. The second was the historic Frontier strike on the Strip, which lasted six years, four months, and ten days, from 1991 through 1998, with no striker ever going back to work across the 24/7 picket line.
The Union had to win these two strikes, both against very wealthy families answerable to no one. Benefit, wage, and job security standards were at stake. So was the Union's aggressive Las Vegas organizing program.
Rich came to Las Vegas over and over during the Horseshoe and Frontier strikes. Rich would be the first to agree that the Union won both strikes because of the courage and commitment of the strikers and strike captains, the extraordinary leadership of Joe Daugherty as well as D. Taylor, Richard McCracken, and other organizers and researchers, the steadfast support financially from the city-wide Culinary and Bartenders membership, and the unwavering support of President Hanley and the International Union.
But Rich Trumka's role in those victories cannot be overstated. The Frontier strikers adopted the slogan of the Pittston strikers, ``One Day Longer.'' Rich inspired the strikers and the entire Union membership again and again, giving all of us confidence that we would win. He worked hard to ensure broad support from the entire American labor movement. He led the charge for Desert Solidarity during the Frontier strike, the largest labor action in Las Vegas history, which closed down the Strip on a busy Saturday night, with participation from Unions throughout the country. Rich also gave our Union a lasting gift by assigning Vinny O'Brien, an amazing talent who organized Desert Solidarity and went on to help so many UNITE HERE Locals over the next 20 years.
In 1995, during the Frontier strike, Rich joined John Sweeney and Linda Chavez Thompson as the candidate for Secretary-Treasurer on the first slate to contest the AFL-CIO leadership in the 40 years since the AFL and CIO merged. That slate won. Ed Hanley surprised many of his labor friends by supporting the Sweeney ticket. Rich served as Secretary-Treasurer until 2009, when he was elected to succeed the retiring Sweeney as President of the AFL-CIO.
In his new AFL-CIO position, Rich's support of HERE didn't let up. He was there when the Frontier strikers joyfully went back to work at midnight on January 31, 1998. And his support wasn't confined to just Las Vegas: wherever our Union needed help, Rich was there. As just three examples among many, he marched in the People's Graduation action by Locals 34 and 35 at Yale University in 1996, he was arrested in a civil disobedience supporting Local 2 members at the San Francisco Hilton in 2010, and he kicked off our global Hyatt Boycott that same year. He was everywhere we asked him to be, and he was always inspirational.
Rich Trumka had a deep relationship with his fellow miners, and with workers of all kinds. He believed in his soul that all people are created equal. Solidarity was not an abstraction to him, perhaps because of his roots in the mines and the United Mine Workers. The pro-worker, pro-immigrant doctrine of his Catholic faith informed his sense of solidarity. When UNITE HERE's Father Clete Kiley started reviving the tradition of Catholic labor priests, Rich was all in.
In 2000, when HERE took the lead in changing AFL-CIO policy to embrace the cause of immigrant workers, Rich supported that fight, drawing on the experiences of his own immigrant family.
A shining chapter of his AFL-CIO leadership came in 2008. Rich relentlessly crisscrossed the Midwestern and Appalachian states, bluntly insisting that white Union members had to confront the racism that held some back from voting for Barrack Obama for President. With his trademark plain-spoken eloquence he described racism as just another form of divide and conquer. His ability to connect with white workers on matters of race and immigration was unmatched.
Rich was very disappointed when HERE helped lead several Unions out of the AFL-CIO in 2005 to organize an alternate federation, Change to Win. Nevertheless, when the Service Employees International Union under then-president Andy Stern attacked UNITE HERE and perverted the goals of Change to Win, Rich warmly welcomed us back into the AFL-CIO fold at the same 2009 Convention where he became AFL-CIO President. He addressed the UNITE HERE 2014 Convention, D. Taylor's first as President.
Rich Trumka was passionate. He was one of the great orators of our time. He was a voracious reader and a keen student of history, especially of the Civil War. Many of us have been frustrated with the AFL-CIO, but I never doubted for a moment Rich's commitment, his moral authority, and his integrity.
Rich Trumka supported worker struggles everywhere. He inspired workers wherever he went. Many different Unions and many different battles benefitted from his help.
But in UNITE HERE, our members have perhaps benefitted to a greater measure than any other Union except, of course, his own United Mine Workers. We had a very special relationship.
I last saw Rich in Washington DC in May of this year. We met at his favorite breakfast place, the Hay-Adams Hotel across the street from the AFL-CIO building. He was in a nostalgic mood. He reminisced with the members of UNITE HERE Local 25 who were servers in the dining room about his intervention when new owners at the Hay-Adams had sought to evade their Union obligations. I told him I had just visited Lebanon, Virginia, my grandfather's home town, where my mother and sister are buried, and nearby Castlewood, where HERE members cooked for the Pittston strikers at Camp Solidarity. I reminded Rich that shortly before my mother passed away he had visited her for several hours, compared notes with her about growing up in coal country, and left her with an autographed copy of a book on UMWA history.
Rich and I talked at that breakfast about many struggles, among them Pittston, the Horseshoe, the Frontier, the fight to change the AFL-CIO immigration policy, and his heroic work in the 2008 presidential campaign. We talked about our mutual admiration for Ed Hanley, D. Taylor, and Joe Daugherty. We talked as well about struggles not yet won, particularly his determination to reform labor law by passing the PRO Act in Congress and his commitment to winning for immigrants.
During that breakfast Rich told me that he had decided to retire at the AFL-CIO Convention in 2022. He was looking forward to spending time with his family and especially his grandchildren, and to pursuing his hobbies, reading, visiting Civil War battlefields, and being in nature, where he loved to hunt, fish, and camp.
His sudden death means that he won't get those opportunities. Like Ed Hanley, he left us too soon. For that I am sad. But miners, UNITE HERE members, and workers everywhere are blessed that he came our way. His inspiring life will outlast the sadness for me, and I hope eventually for his family.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 150
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