Strikewave: Richard Trumka’s legacy will be the AFL-CIO’s future —
Thanks to Ira Grupper for sending us this.
By C.M. LEWIS
Richard L. Trumka, long-time President of the AFL-CIO, has died, leaving a void previously filled by a giant of the movement—one once at the forefront of efforts to reform labor.
Trumka was born in southwestern Pennsylvania into a coal mining family. He, too, entered work in the mines in 1968, just over a year before Jack Yablonski, a reformer in the United Mine Workers’ of America, was murdered in southwestern Pennsylvania on the orders of the incumbent President, Tony Boyle. Trumka, who later completed a Bachelors’ of Science at Penn State University and became a lawyer for the UMWA after attending Villanova for law school, was deeply affected by Yablonski’s reform movement; Yablonski’s son, Chip, said that Trumka,“helped restore things to the way they should have been.”