Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, has declared the five week shutdown of the Indiana legislature — led by Democrats upset with Republican-led right-to-work laws and Gov. Mitch Daniels’ (R) agenda — to be an unqualified success.
Trumka told TPM at a roundtable with reporters that despite the hardships he said were faced by union workers, labor supporters and Democrats in general in Indiana, progressive-leaning politicians in the Hoosier state were able to pull off the upset win.
“I mean, they knocked out right to work,” Trumka said, referring to the AWOL state House Democrats, who returned to Indianapolis after winning concessions from the majority GOP. “But they also were able to make more mild some of the crazy cuts Mitch Daniels had proposed, so they made those bills a whole lot better for workers in that state.”
Although something of a footnote to the high-profile labor struggles in Wisconsin and Ohio, the battle in Indiana featured the same union-fueled mass protests. But where Ohio and Wisconsin are known for being at least purple and possessing powerful labor bases, Indiana is generally seen as a Republican enclave (save for President Obama’s 2008 win there) and not the likeliest place for progressive politics to flourish. (Take for example Daniels’ unilateral dismantling of state workers’ collective bargaining rights back in 2005.)
Trumka said “the struggle’s not over” in Indiana, but he said that the process so far shows union pressure can succeed where it’s not politically supposed to.
“You know everybody would have said, ‘that’s a very, very conservative state. Getting Democrats to jump up and do something is impossible,'” Trumka said. “But they were out for, what 32-33 days? And they weren’t going to come back until the deal was cut. And [Daniels] rightfully came back to the table and did a deal.”
