Labor In The News: Can Damon Silvers save organized labor?

(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