In November 1983 in New York City, Trumka was honored at the annual luncheon of the Labor Research Association, a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) front group.

In 1989 Trumka earned a seat on the AFL-CIO’s executive council.

On May 13, 1991, the Workers Defense League, which was influenced heavily by the Democratic Socialists of America, presented Trumka with its David Clendenin Award.

In 1994, Trumka was honored at the annual Eugene Debs Award Banquet in Terre Haute, Indiana; The award was named after the man who founded the Socialist Party of America and ran for U.S. President five times on the Socialist Party ticket.

In 1995 Trumka was one-third of a troika elected to head the AFL-CIO. His running mates for election were John Sweeney, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and Linda Chavez-Thompson, who had been executive vice president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

[OCS: The SEIU was founded by Wade Rathke. a community and labor activist and veteran of the Maoist oriented Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Rathke also founded the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in 1970.] 

Calling themselves the “New Voice” of the labor movement, this threesome pledged to change the policies of the moderate AFL-CIO leaders who had preceded them. Trumka would go on to serve as the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer from 1995 to September 2009, second-in-command to its president, John Sweeney.

Trumka, Sweeney, and Chavez-Thompson represented a turn away from blue-collar industrial unionism and the AFL-CIO’s traditional emphasis on raising wages and improving working conditions. Rather, they focused on recruiting ever-growing numbers of government workers who would benefit from higher taxes and bigger government, and who therefore would reliably support socialism and America’s pro-big government Democratic Party.

Soon after winning their election in 1995, Trumka and his fellow triumvirs instituted “Union Summer,” an effort “to recruit and train hundreds of young people as organizers and political activists.” The “Union Summer” indoctrination materials endorsed by Trumka use explicitly anti-capitalist, class-warfare rhetoric, instructing young participants to recite a pledge called “Working Class Commitment” that included the Marxist dogma “that we [union workers] produce the world’s wealth … [and] will end all oppression.” Unlike their more moderate predecessors, Trumka and his fellow AFL-CIO bosses saw free-market capitalism not as essential to worker prosperity but as something to be despised and destroyed. Their ultimate aim was not to boost members’ wages, but to radically transform society. Trumka would confirm this in a September 2010 moment of candor, when he stated that he had gotten “into the labor movement not because I wanted to negotiate wages,” but “because I saw it as a vehicle to do massive social change to include lots of people.”

The agenda of Trumka and his fellow “New Voice” leaders was to promote “class-based organizing,” on the theory — as explained by labor economist Michael Yates — that “those unions which mobilize rank-and-file workers around a program of aggressive solidarity and conflict with their employers have the best chance of winning union elections, bargaining good contracts, and resisting decertification.”

Trumka aggressively developed and promoted radical strategies and tactics like those of the 1960s New Left for signing up workers. These measures included the formation of labor alliances with media, government, and radical activists. The objective was to intimidate companies by threatening to inflict a “death of a thousand cuts” via negative-publicity campaigns, harassment of corporate investors, alliances with government regulators, and more.

[Opening the union to declared anti-America, anti-capitalist, communists…]

Trumka, Sweeney and Chavez-Thompson also rescinded a founding AFL-CIO rule that banned Communist Party members and loyalists from leadership positions within the Federation and its unions. Instead, the “New Voice” triumvirate welcomed Communist Party delegates to positions of power in the Federation. This move to open the previously patriotic union to subversives delighted the CPUSA, which declared itself “in complete accord” with the troika’s new AFL-CIO program. “The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,” wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 about the Trumka/Sweeney/Chavez-Thompson takeover.

[OCS: Remember the Cloward-Piven strategy that seeks to destroy capitalism by "overwhelming the resources available by advocating increased enrollment in social welfare programs in order to collapse that system?"

Piven said of the Occupy movement,

• The Occupy Movement is made up of "All parts of the Left."

• That includes proudly: "Democrats, Socialists, Communists, Anarchists."

• Must all work together because of the "Huge task of transforming America and the world."

• "We are all together"]

In 1996, Trumka was one of approximately 130 people who played a role in helping Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey establish the Campaign for America’s Future. Among the other co-founders were such notables as Mary Frances Berry, Julian Bond, Heather Booth, John Cavanagh, Richard Cloward, Jeff Cohen, Ken Cook, Peter Dreier, Barbara Ehrenreich, Betty Friedan, Todd Gitlin, Heidi Hartmann, Tom Hayden, Denis Hayes, Roger Hickey, Patricia Ireland, Jesse Jackson, Joseph Lowery, Steve Max, Gerald McEntee, Harold Meyerson, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Reich, Mark Ritchie, Arlie Schardt, Susan Shaer, Andrew Stern, and John Sweeney.

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