Labor In The News: Can Damon Silvers save organized labor?
Wednesday, November 20, 2013(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
“Damon
Silvers still remembers the pickles,” writes Lydia DePillis in a November 18
Washington Post profile of the AFL-CIO policy director.
“In
2011, at a roundtable discussion in Durham, N.C., the President’s Council on
Jobs and Competitiveness showcased biotech firms that weren’t planning to
hire
anybody, remnants of the textile industry, and an artisan pickle maker.
Silvers, the policy director of the AFL-CIO, concedes that the jobs council was
celebrating some wonderful entrepreneurial people. But really, he says, it was
evidence of a collapsing industrial economy and a president who seems to have
given up on pushing a comprehensive progressive agenda. ‘If we become a
society
of a handful of biotech engineers working for companies that are going to move
jobs overseas and the rest of us are fighting for jobs stuffing pickles into
jars, that’s not the kind of place you want to live,’ he says.”
photo
by Linda
Davidson/The Washington Post