Well, isn’t this interesting.
The AFL-CIO will not endorse Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, according to a report from The Huffington Post.
Many of the nation’s top unions have thrown their weight behind Clinton, but AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told members the federation is staying out of it.
This is, of course, not so much good news for Bernie Sanders as it is horrible news for Hillary Clinton. At a guess, the AFL-CIO is hedging its bets. If Sanders wins, the union’s decision to stay out will look like a tacit support of him; but if Clinton wins, well, what can she do? She still needs the organization for the general election. It’s win-win!
[pause]
What’s that? “What do the rank-and-file union members want?” Why, I don’t know if anybody’s ever asked that question before. I don’t know if any of the people involved can really find a way to properly visualize the question, either. Certainly none of them particularly care…
(Via @NumbersMuncher.)
Actually if you have friends on the inside of a union there are a number asking what the frack are we paying dues for to an organization that PACs for a branch of the government that makes deals to ship our jobs overseas. Let alone not even talk about the Cadillac tax that is still hanging like sword over all the federation members heads, remember that the Longshoremen (a tradtionally socialists sort of group and vote always democratic even if the dems promised to kill the first born of everyone’s family) told Trumka to play the home game version of GFY after thier lawyers looked at the ACA rules that were passed or written into the CFR. I was part of the International Machinists union and during the big fight a couple of years ago with the only other commercial manufacturer of aviation products, it came out that our president of the union who was the right hand man of Trumka at the federation meetings was backed by Trumka and told us to take a loss of both pension and a loss of our medical insurance benefits because well it would be good for the company and good for the union. Then watched as both performed live sex acts with the Governor as he basically said that if the contract passes then as part of the deal would be that new taxes to pay for new roads and services would have to pass because both the union and the company asked for it. If it didn’t pass and Boeing left, well then the union was at fault for destroying the economy miracle that is the Puget Sound. It was amazing how many eyes at the worker level opened up to the dual faces of both Trumka and our union president. The fight for leadership later and the information that came out of not just nepotism (cousins and children of important head or former heads hired for 6 figure pay checks of offices or even created offices), they were using a foreign built private jet for anything but official capacity travel, the “strike fund” was being depleted and not replenished as per the grand lodge rules. The list went on and on. Trumka became a name to cause some die hard members to spit and some of them even started to question thier political loyalist ideas. However, when I left most them started to go to the Bern.
Meanwhile, Trumka is dealing with all manner of additional fights from other rank and file folks who are calling for his head. Even more so as folks point out that he stumped for Obama and others that are now supporting the TPP, which might move more jobs overseas. Others again like my local governor who has taken up green initiatives of denial of both port jobs and shipping jobs because we don’t like coal or oil or we want trains, have been stumped for by the AFL-CIO. There is dissent there, but the GOP doesn’t know how to explore and explain why they are better. So most of the file has gone to the Bern because Hillary seems more of the same and most remember her Hubby’s involved into NAFTA which seemed to start the movement overseas for cheaper less regulated lands.