AFL-CIO President Emeritus John Sweeney Joins the Mass. AFL-CIO Organizing Roundtable

 

On Tuesday, April 13^th, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO was honored to have AFL-CIO President Emeritus John Sweeney join the monthly Organizing Roundtable as a guest speaker. President Sweeney, who was offered a fellowship at Harvard University after retiring as President of the AFL-CIO, has been taking up residence at Harvard for the past several months while teaching courses at the Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics. Since being in town, President Sweeney has become involved in some of our local labor struggles, including speaking on the steps of Bank of America during a labor rally there in March.

 

At the Organizing Roundtable, President Sweeney spoke of the desperate need for federal labor law reform in order to level the playing field for workers who wish to join unions. Speaking on the Employee Free Choice Act – the legislative vehicle for reforming our nation’s broken labor laws and restoring the freedom to join a union, he said, “We are not about to give up on the Employee Free Choice Act.” He went on to say that he is confident in the Obama Administration’s commitment and ability to pass labor law reform through the Congress.

 

President Sweeney touched on a number of topics during his remarks, including the AFL-CIO’s current campaigns for job creation and financial reform, followed by questions from those in attendance.     

 

Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Robert Haynes, in his introduction of President Sweeney, pointed out that the very idea of convening a monthly Organizing Roundtable came out of a renewed commitment to organizing that began after John Sweeney’s election as President of the AFL-CIO in 1995. President Haynes went on to say that John Sweeney “has done an incredible amount to further the cause of organizing,” including his initiative to call on unions to devote 30 percent of their operating budget to organizing new workers and spearheading the AFL-CIO Voice@Work campaign, which encouraged unions to share best practices and provide organizing support to each other during campaigns. As President of SEIU from 1980-1995, John Sweeney nearly doubled the size of that union from 625,000 to 1.1 million.