Tefere Gebre is not your father’s – or your grand-father’s – labor leader, and he says of the labor movement that “we have a different world” to confront.  “We need to think differently,” he adds.

And that’s a big reason why the 44-year-old former Ethiopian refugee will be the next executive vice president of the AFL-CIO.

Gebre, now executive director of the Orange County, Calif., Labor Federation, will succeed Arlene Holt Baker, the veteran civil rights activist, in the fed’s #3 job.  He combines union organizing, community activism and a heavy dose of politics.

In a speech to the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), and in a Sept. 8 press conference during the federation’s convention in Los Angeles, Gebre outlined a wide range of community initiatives his federation undertook that converted notoriously conservative Orange County – once represented by Right Wing GOP Rep. “B-1 Bob” Dornan -- into the Southern California version of a swing state.

Now Orange is a political a toss-up. A Democratic pro-worker congresswoman, Loretta Sanchez, beat Dornan.  Orange’s new pro-worker Democratic state lawmakers provided the margin for the party’s supermajority in Sacramento. Citing that, Gebre says of labor’s political future that “if it’s doable in Orange County, it’s doable anywhere.”

After emigrating as a political refugee from his war-torn native land, Gebre went through high school as a track star and through college on a combination of a track scholarship and working, including for UPS as a member of Teamsters Local 396.

But he gained his political chops by later work for legendary California House Speaker Willie Brown (D), a political powerhouse in Sacramento.  Gebre then became political director for a Laborers local before joining the Orange County Labor Federation first as its political director and then, for the last eight years, as its executive director.

That’s where Gebre put into effect the coalition-building skills he will bring to the AFL-CIO job – and coalition-building with like-minded progressive groups is a key part of federation President Richard Trumka’s platform to expand and restore labor’s clout, in politics, in workplaces and in direct action.  Convention delegates will elect Trumka, Gebre and incumbent Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler to 4-year terms on Sept. 10.
 

Gebre explained his federation – after a key narrow election setback – took stock of its entire operation and of those elsewhere in the Golden State, the nation’s largest. What they found, he told the press conference, was a stark difference in turnout: Where labor worked with other progressive and community allies, its own members’ and families’ turnout was much higher than average turnout.  In areas where labor worked alone, it wasn’t.

So the Orange County fed embarked on massive daily registration drives, in concert with its allies, among Latino and Vietnamese groups, to register unregistered union voters, to get green card holders to apply for and receive citizenship and then register, and to organize them.  “Two thousand registered, 200,000 to go,” he says.  

“It was coming together with our community allies to change ‘Nixon County’ into a place where we can get elected and effect change in people’s lives,” he said, referring to the former, notorious, late GOP president who also once represented Southern California.  “Now, there’ll be a formal partnership on the organizing front,” Gebre says.

Now, Gebre says, he’ll help Trumka’s team bring that partnership to nationwide campaigns, with groups representing women, gays, Latinos, immigrants, environmentalists, civil rights and labor all helping each other and working on each other’s causes – continuously.

“This convention is very different from anything we have seen in recent history in the labor movement,” he said days before.  “I have personally never seen a labor meeting more open and ready to bring in more people – a labor movement that is now willing to speak up for the people who sweat behind the counters and in the kitchens of McDonald's, the cab drivers, the domestic workers, and the day laborers.”

Those continuous campaigns helped increase union membership in Orange County by 60,000 in Gebre’s tenure.  In another, for the Teamsters, Gebre successfully signed up 400 workers who toiled as sorters of trash.  They waded through tons of garbage that passed them on a conveyor belt at a facility where the truck drivers were unionized but the immigrant garbage workers were not.

And Gebre also put into practice a goal AFL-CIO leaders have long talked about but infrequently imposed: Holding politicians accountable for their positions. His federation will not give a political candidate labor’s endorsement until the candidate takes a 5-hour class on union history and values.  Some 500 have done so.  If hopefuls win, and then don’t stand up for workers, they feel the heat.  Gebre told of one a lawmaker who voted against an increase in the minimum wage, only to be deluged – and publicly shamed – by 2,000 handwritten letters from constituents demanding to know why he voted against them and their families.