Portland, OR
The AFL-CIO, along with its international and national union affiliates, state federations and labor councils is embarked on an ambitious program to strengthen the American labor movement. The Executive Council of the Federation has adopted a program agenda centered on four strategic goals: organizing new workers, building political power, speaking for workers in the global economy and building a voice for workers in the community.
As national unions expand their organizing programs, implement their political initiatives and continue to fight for their members on the job and in their communities, they need the sustained support of strong and united local labor movements where their members live and work. National unions and their local affiliates depend upon the solidarity of all local unions to help them to mobilize all union members to give public support and visibility to their organizing, bargaining, political and legislative campaigns. The experience of the labor movement in the 1996 national election campaign demonstrates that our collective ability to achieve clear goals happens when all of the labor movement is united around a common objective.
Clear goals and common objectives are at the heart of the new AFL-CIO initiative called Union Cities. Union Cities is designed to create an ongoing support structure at the local level for the critical struggles that national affiliates and local unions face every day. Union Cities challenges local labor movements to rally around a common agenda. Union Cities is a new blueprint for action that has evolved from many months of discussions with national and international unions and with several hundred central labor council leaders, throughout the nation, under the aegis of the AFL-CIO Labor Council Advisory Committee.
The AFL-CIO Executive Council urges all international and national affiliates to directly engage their locals in support of the Union Cities' agenda. The Federation will work with national unions, state federations and central labor councils to insure that the programmatic goals of Union Cities are fully coordinated and integrated into the work of our national affiliates.
Building Union Cities' programs in communities across America will provide the critical support for the labor movement to achieve the goals we all share for good jobs, a better quality of life and a vibrant voice for working families on the job and in the community.