Wilhelm Fires Up Union Convention

It’s the worst of times — and a chance to make it the best of times for American labor.

Union leader John Wilhelm delivered a fiery call to action with that message Thursday at the biennial convention of the state AFL-CIO.

Wilhelm, president of the national hotel workers union, returned to New Haven’s Omni Hotel to half-holler his 30-minute speech before hundreds of delegates assembled in the ballroom. To many in the crowd, he is a hero. Wilhelm’s union led the fight to unionize the Omni. Before he took over the national Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union, Wilhelm organized Yale’s pink-collar Local 34 and led landmark strikes against the university on behalf of office and blue-collar workers.

In New Haven, Wilhelm has always had the ability to arouse a crowd and inspire union activists. Thursday was no exception.

He acknowledged the hard times facing Connecticut — and called them an “opportunity” to rebuild the labor movement.

He called the current “depression” the worst since the 1930s — the same decade that saw the birth of the modern labor movement.

“The labor movement as we know it today was largely built in the darkest of economic times,” Wilhelm said. “I believe then as now the same thing is true. When workers are pushed too far, that if the labor movement provides an alternative, if we can give people hope, that workers will stand up and fight.”

They’re fighting now in Connecticut, he noted. Machinists are fighting to save 1,000 jobs at plants in East Hartford and Cheshire that Pratt & Whitney might shut down. Postal workers are fighting to keep branches open. AT&T workers have been without a contract for months in a dispute partly over proposed health care givebacks.

“I consider this AT&T fight to be a symbol of what is going on in this country,” Wilhelm said. AT&T “continues to report billions of dollars in profits. They have no hardship claim … Yet they want to take back.”

Even Red Cross workers are in a contract dispute. That’s a particular outrage, Wilhelm declared: “Where does the blood come from the Red Cross? It comes from working people.”

The labor movement can seize this moment for political change across the U.S. by pushing Congress to pass President Obama’s health care reform plan as well as reform of labor and immigration laws, Wilhelm said. (Click on the play arrow above to watch some of his remarks on immigration; he has pushed the AFL-CIO nationally to embrace the plight of immigrant workers.)

Wavering Democrats especially need to feel union pressure, Wilhelm said: “The Democrats who you worked so hard … to send to Congress. We were told, ‘If we get a majority, we can fix these things.’ Well, they have a majority. And they damn well better fix the labor laws of this country.”

Meanwhile, organized labor has to return to … organizing labor, Wilhelm said. He noted that only some 12 percent of the national workforce belongs to unions, and only about 7.5 percent of the private sector. Unions need a dramatic need approach, he said, a “bottom-up” “empowerment” approach similar to Obama’s presidential campaign.

HERE, Wilhelm’s union, has been embroiled in a dispute with a former ally, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The national SEIU has been raiding HERE chapters in other states, hoping to get workers to vote to affiliate with SEIU instead. That has drained energy and manpower away from potential new organizing drives.

While that dispute has been a day-to-day “distraction,” it has also pointed up an important difference of views about how unions should organize, Wilhelm argued.

“Are we going to have a labor movement where a few very smart people sit in an office in Washington, D.C. and make decisions for the rest of us?” he asked. Or will organized labor build a movement “Where workers mean something?… If we can’t build a meaningful labor movement at the grassroots level, we are finished.”

Most people would call John Wilhelm “very smart.” But he put himself in the second camp. And he’s not finished.