AFL-CIO Confronts Post-Trumka Era With Crucial Vote on Successor (1)

In the last years of his life, the late AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka often included a warning in his public speeches: Labor leaders once thought that technology would create more economic equality by increasing workers’ efficiency and raising standards of living; but that assumption, he’d say, was proven to be false by the rise of Big Tech, automation, and e-commerce.

Trumka’s remarks were a tacit acknowledgment that the labor movement was still losing ground in what he saw as a second industrial revolution. The exploitation of workers would continue, he predicted, if unions didn’t fight back.

That task will now ...