Public Employee Press

New labor chief hits Wall Street on record bonuses

As the newly elected president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka led a rally at the Stock Exchange in Lower Manhattan Sept. 19 and called out the greedy Wall Street executives who received government bailout funds, took record bonuses, but did little to improve the economy for working people.

“We are here to demand more accountability from our financial system — from Wall Street — from the Masters of the Universe who speculate in phony financial instruments rather than invest in the real economy,” Trumka said.

He spoke out for working families and small businesses and supported President Barack Obama’s proposals for health-care reform and regulation of the financial institutions that he said, “nearly drove our economy off a cliff.” With Trumka, a beefy former coal miner known as a powerful speaker, were new Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler and Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker.

The three were elected together Sept. 16 at an AFL-CIO convention where 43 percent of the delegates were women and minorities — a record infusion of new blood into the labor movement. Shuler, from the electrical workers’ union, is the first woman secretary-treasurer and the youngest ever. Holt Baker, from AFSCME, is the first elected African American officer.

Obama addressed the conference of the 57-union American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, which includes AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, DC 37’s 1.5 million-member national union.

Pressed between police barricades and the façade of luxury boutique Hermès — where a scarf can cost more than a city worker takes home in a week — Trumka warned Wall Street not to “lard your executives with bonuses while squeezing families out of their homes with unfair lending.”

As he spoke, Wall Street firms planned to pay out record year-end bonuses and too many working families faced home foreclosures, bankruptcies and double-digit unemployment levels.