Friends and associates of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka have noticed that the labor boss has been smiling a bit more lately.
And, he tells the Examiner, it’s not just because he believes Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton will win, but because he just became a first-time grandfather last month.
“Aside from the fact that I couldn’t and can’t stop smiling every time I think about him, I look at him, it gave me a renewed sense of why we do what we do and and we’re doing it for,” said the former coal miner.
Trumka comes from a family of union workers and organizers, going back to his coal miner grandparents. Family, he said, was the foundation for all he’s done since. “Unionism in our household was everything,” he said in a special AFL-CIO video series on what grandparents taught members.
He said the birth of his grandson has changed him and his outlook.
“It had a pretty dramatic effect on me. It really did. When I first saw my grandchild, I was in the hospital when he was born, and I first held him. It really gave me a moment for pause and it sort of made me look at what I do and give new meaning to what I do,” he said in a pre-Labor Day media breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
“We’re not just fighting for ourselves, but we’re fighting for him, that generation and the generation that comes after. So it gives you a different sense, a renewed sense of importance about what the country is, what kind of country it is, what it stands for and what my grandson is going to inherit in the process,” he added.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
