The AFL-CIO opened its annual three-day winter conference Monday in Atlanta, which will focus on raising wages, income and racial inequality and boosting union membership nationally, but particularly in the South, where right-to-work laws and other policies have limited efforts to organize labor.
The meeting also comes at a time when initiatives in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and New Mexico have been debated or enacted that are designed to stymie unions. And organization efforts at Southern auto plants have also run into major hurdles.
The Atlanta location – at the Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel – is also a signal of the organization’s emphasis on promoting its push to boost wages and union membership in the largely non-union South.
AFL-CIO leaders are working on ways to boost membership in public and private sectors and pitch collective bargaining as a way of combating income inequality and getting more Americans into the middle class.
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said Monday that 2015 “could be the year for collective action.”
“We are going to be negotiating more contracts this year than any other in the history of the labor movement,” Trumpka said in a briefing with press to start Monday’s session.
The annual event, being held for the first time in Atlanta, brings together the top officials of the nation’s most powerful labor unions. The group will rally this week behind its national “Raising Wages” campaign, and also hold a labor town hall-style meeting with former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.
Trumka said the political discourse is ripe to discuss income inequality, and he mentioned the recent announcement last week that Wal-Mart will give hundreds of thousands of workers a pay bump as a reflection of pressure from working class people to address quality of life issues.
Democrats and Republicans have both failed to discuss issues that matter to working people as corporate profits have hit historic highs and wages have flattened or faltered.
Trumka said AFL-CIO post-election research found that during the 2014 midterms, “91 percent of voters had flat or falling wages.” But voters really didn’t hear messages that spoke to these concerns from either major party, he said.
“If you want the support of working people, talk to their issues,” Trumka said.
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