The face was rounder, the midriff more thickset and the temples grayer. But the voice resounding from the steps of the U.S. Capitol was the very same robust one heard nearly two decades earlier in the coal fields of West Virginia and Southern Illinois.
“I want you to remind them,” Richard Trumka told thousands assembled last week to lobby the U.S. Congress, “that this is a debate about real people, real workers, mothers and fathers and sons and daughters who are being sacrificed on an altar of greed called the global economy.”
In a town rife with rituals, this was the well-choreographed and long-winded outpouring of organized labor on a sunny spring day rallying against granting special trade status to China. And the last of 16 speakers was a man on a wire, Trumka, the secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO.
“Who is he?” asked a stoop-shouldered, retired autoworker from Detroit, impressed by the speaker’s rhetorical skill and verve.
Trumka, 50, is the third-ranking officer in the famous labor federation and testament to the promise and risks confronting an outsider-turned-insider in Washington. That was clear when a labor official whispered her anxiety that the many Teamsters in the crowd might “cause a stink” when Trumka was introduced.
Ah, yes, what a difference a few years makes.
In 1982, Trumka did an impetuous thing. The son of a coal miner in Nemacolin, Pa., and himself a miner-turned-union lawyer, he took on the well-entrenched, if uninspired, president of the United Mine Workers of America, an embattled organization with a storied history but afflicted with ethical mishaps and administrative disarray.
It seemed the longest of shots, all the more so when the labor establishment, including the AFL-CIO, essentially backed incumbent Sam Church Jr. and some engaged in shameful badmouthing, including even 1950s-like red-baiting, of Trumka.
It was venom based on ignorance, I found as I traveled the land with a deeply patriotic small-town kid of moderate political views. He drove hundreds of miles with a band of chums, the crew sleeping on friends’ couches, hitting every coal mine and proving sensitive to rank-and-file dissatisfaction not gleaned by labor pooh-bahs back in D.C.
I wrote a piece commissioned by Esquire magazine but it declined to run it. The thesis, that Trumka was fresh, Church tired, and that the insurgent would pull a huge upset, perhaps even prove to be a future star, seemed too brash.
I sold a version to The Washington Post and, for the last time in my life, was proven correct as Trumka worked the pants off the smug Church. He took over a beleaguered union, largely afflicted by dwindling members due to sweeping changes in its industry, and was adroit and passionate enough to become a force in the labor movement.
In 1995, he was part of a mini-revolution within the AFL-CIO and became the secretary-treasurer. He is among those who deserve credit for a number of victories and a new vitality within an institution still given to a certain languor.
He ticks off the 265,000 net increase in members last year, a more efficient use of resources, the 2,000 union members running for political office on all levels of government, and bona fide bargaining wins, such as the one Trumka assisted recently on behalf of Boeing Corp. engineers and technicians who struck the firm for 40 days.
“It was not a strike about money. It was about respect. Profits are high, the stock is up and they all feel they had no say or direction in the company,” Trumka said Friday, in one of many offices undergoing a redesign that suggests labor might mull unionizing some interior decorators.
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Trumka was especially good on the double-edge sword of prosperity and its impact on organizing, and how for every Boeing example, there are others that didn’t cut his way. And he conceded that, more the administrator now, he misses the rough and tumble of his mine union days.
He is, after all, now part of an establishment, which has brought its own problems.
In particular there is what federal prosecutors discern to be suspect actions that benefited another union leader in 1996.
The matter involves the re-election bid that year of Teamsters President Ron Carey, a gadfly reformer who exploited a government takeover of the long-corrupt union to pull a stunning, Walter Mitty-like victory in 1991.
By 1995, however, the bloom was off the rose. Carey squandered huge amounts of goodwill, was not a forceful leader and failed to expand his base. Faced with a formidable threat from James Hoffa Jr., lawyer and son of the legendary boss, he and top aides realized he needed lots of money to shore up his campaign.
The details of what allegedly played out are intricate and not pretty. According to the tale portrayed in several guilty pleas and one guilty jury verdict in a federal trial last November in New York, it appears that a raft of folks feverishly sought to help Carey and devised less-than-subtle ways around laws barring union or employer monies from funding elections for union members.
The cast of characters includes Carey aides and consultants, others in labor, and top Democratic Party fundraisers, notably President Clinton top gun Terence McAuliffe and Laura Hartigan, daughter of longtime Illinois politician Neil Hartigan.
This crew seems to have included good-hearted unionists genuinely convinced the Teamsters would be far worse off if Hoffa were elected.
But there are also the arrogant, liberal do-gooders who felt their enemies justified making a counterattack by any means and, this being Washington, the craven, big-bucks consultants, led by some $1 million-a-year direct-mail specialists.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars went this way, then went that way, including a $475,000 Teamsters contribution to the consumer activist Citizen Action group. Then, dollars found their way into the coffers of the Carey campaign, including $95,000 from the wife of Michael Ansara, a just-compensated Carey consultant who himself was a leader of the utopian Students for a Democratic Society in his Vietnam-era Harvard days, indicating that perhaps his strong disdain of the free market had dissipated.
As for the Democrats, ” . . . the concept of fundraising for the Carey campaign and the Teamsters’ Union donating to the DNC [Democratic National Committee] were inextricably linked. If you raise money for the Carey campaign, then the Teamsters’ Union will give you money. That’s a quid pro quo,” declared prosecutor Martine Beamon during her closing argument last year.
Ultimately all this was to no avail as irregularities forced a rerunning of the election and Carey lost.
Somewhere in the mix, according to the prosecution, is Trumka, which also explains why some Hoffa acolytes at the rally were thought primed to offer him a Bronx cheer (they did not).
Represented by Nicole Seligman, one of President Clinton’s impeachment lawyers, he invoked his 5th Amendment right before a grand jury. At the trial of the Teamsters’ former political director, his name surfaced as approving hefty transfers of funds that the government seems to deem part of an illegal scheme.
So his many fans wonder why have the Feds strung matters out and not announced a final action against him or McAuliffe? Friends of the convicted political director scratch their heads.
Trumka would not discuss the matter. But friends say he vigorously contends that he has been smeared. As with the political director, nobody suggests he stood to gain financially.
Trumka is a proud dad of a 15-year-old son, coaches sports teams and talks poignantly of his own dad’s death last year, a victim of a long struggle with the miner’s nemesis, black lung disease.
We spoke of his frustrations with Clinton, the blurring of news and entertainment values in the media and, of course, his inspiring victory 18 years ago.
Having seen him then in his parents’ small house in Nemacolin long ago, the dandy corner view of the White House is a reminder of humble beginnings, an honorable journey and, also, the perils of power.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.