The problem: Billionaires. The solution? Unions. That was the message at a high-energy AFL-CIO rally of Atlanta union workers on its national Better in a Union bus tour last week.
Hundreds of Atlanta union members and allies packed into the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 613 union hall in Mechanicsville on July 22 to hear from nearly a dozen local union representatives from the AFL-CIO, Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, National Nurses United (NNU), the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE).
“We all are living on the edge as working people, and more acutely than ever right now,” the headliner, AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, told the crowd. “Working people are working longer and harder – and getting less in return.”
Shuler and the other union leaders took aim at billionaires like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who, she said, “have rigged the game.”
“Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame is sending his wife into outer space, while the workers at his Amazon factory down the road here in Atlanta are throwing out their backs, peeing in bottles because they’re so overworked and underpaid. Does that make any sense? It’s because they’ve rigged the game,” she said. “They have billions of dollars, they have their special interests, they have politicians like Donald Trump, who just handed them another tax cut.”
Teamsters Local 728 vice president Chuck Stiles said the ultra-wealthy are “shaking down” the American people in a fiery, expletive-laden speech. He called Bill Gates a “f–ing hypocrite” due to his substantial ownership stake in waste management company Republic Services, as Teamsters workers at the company’s Cumming facility continue their three-week strike over stalled contract negotiations for better pay and working conditions.
“Let me tell you what these lobbies, these millionaires have done. Alright? They have come up with a scheme that would make the mafia blush,” Stiles said to raucous applause. “They’re shaking down everybody in this room!”
“The hell with those billionaire bastards!” he added. “Let’s take this country back for working families. To hell with them with their gated communities — we’re coming for them one day.”
With the national AFL-CIO bus-stop tour, Shuler aims to channel the energy and anger from working class Americans at the rich and powerful into resurgent union power. “The one thing that they do not have, the one thing they cannot buy is worker power,” she said to cheers.
But with President Donald Trump’s aggressively pro-corporate agenda, Shuler and her fellow unionists face an uphill battle.
Shuler addressed Trump’s nomination of two anti-union picks to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in an interview with Atlanta Civic Circle on the sidelines of the event. The NLRB referees union elections and disputes between labor and management.
“We, of course, want to give folks the benefit of the doubt, but my understanding is that they have a history of union busting,” Shuler said, commenting on Trump’s nominations of Republicans Scott Mayer, the chief labor lawyer for Boeing, and James Murphy, a career NLRB lawyer who has served as staff counsel to numerous Republican NLRB board members.
“If we don’t have a traffic cop that can actually put the needs of working people first, then the system doesn’t work like it should,” she said.
Even so, Shuler believes worker power can overcome an anti-labor NLRB. “It’s going to be, obviously, more challenging in this environment, but working people are rising up in their own ways, regardless,” she said. “Over history, they’ve never let an NLRB stop them.”
