Labor chief: Unions to push wage issues in 2016 election

Politicians of all ideologies have failed American workers in an era of rising corporate profits and declining wages, the top U.S. labor leader said this week, vowing to pressure candidates running for president in 2016 to address the issue.

The largest U.S. association of workers is meeting in Atlanta this week to work on its strategy for the upcoming campaign. The leader of the 12.5-million member organization said higher wages can be a “unifying progressive value,” but acknowledged unions are struggling to connect with voters skeptical of the benefits of organized labor.

“The economy is nothing but a set of rules that make the winners and losers,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said. “Those rules are made by the people we elect. We should elect people who change the rules.”

This week’s AFL-CIO meeting comes amid a long decline in the influence of organized labor, which tends to support Democrats. According to a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center, the percentage of all American wage and salary workers who belonged to a union declined from 20 percent in 1983 to 11 percent in 2013. The peak came in 1954, at 34.8 percent.

Trumka cited the success of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican presidential contender who curtailed bargaining rights for public employees in his state.

Walker survived a subsequent recall attempt and then won re-election, and lawmakers in Wisconsin are now pushing to pass right-to-work legislation that would limit the organizing power of private-sector unions.

Trumka said AFL-CIO plans to sponsor “wage summits” in four states that hold early presidential nominating contests: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. The organization also wants to focus on what Trumka called political “divisiveness” that he said drives many Americans to vote against their economic interests.

That approach generally aligns with a Democratic National Committee analysis, released earlier this month, of the party’s 2014 losses. It concluded the party has failed to communicate its core values, particularly to working-class white voters.

Trumka said labor has a “good relationship” with former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the favorite for the Democratic nomination should she run as expected.

Trumka described priorities for 2016 that put his organization partly at odds with both major parties. He emphasized the AFL-CIO’s opposition to President Barack Obama’s effort to win “fast-track” authority to negotiate trade deals, saying the “undemocratic, unpatriotic” proposal would lead to lower wages in the U.S. because of increased overseas competition.