Trumka, Richard L. (Richard Louis), 1949-2021

<p>Richard L. Trumka is president of the 12.5-million-member AFL-CIO. An outspoken advocate for social and economic justice, Trumka is the nation’s clearest voice on the critical need to ensure that all workers have a good job and the power to determine their wages and working conditions. He heads the labor movement’s efforts to create an economy based on broadly shared prosperity and to hold elected officials and employers accountable to working families.</p>

<p>In 1982, at age 33, Trumka ran on a reform ticket and was elected the youngest president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).</p>

<p>There, in addition to reforming the UMWA’s fractious bureaucracy, he led one of the most successful strikes in recent American history against the Pittston Coal Company, which tried to avoid paying into an industry-wide health and pension fund.</p>

<p>Richard Louis Trumka (July 24, 1949 – August 5, 2021) was an American attorney and organized labor leader. He served as president of the United Mine Workers from 1982 to 1995, and then was secretary-general of the AFL-CIO from 1995 to 2009. He was elected president of the AFL–CIO on September 16, 2009, at the federation's convention in Pittsburgh, and served in that position until his death.</p>

<p>Trumka was born on July 24, 1949 in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, to an Italian American mother, Eola Elizabeth (née Bertugli), and a second-generation Polish American father, coal miner Frank Richard Trumka. He went to work in the mines in 1968. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1971 and a Juris Doctor from Villanova University School of Law in 1974.</p>

<p>From 1974 to 1979, Trumka was a staff attorney with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) at their headquarters in Washington, D.C. He was elected to the board of directors of UMWA District 4 in 1981 and became president of the UMWA in 1982.</p>