The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports today on the impending takeover of the top job at the AFL-CIO by Richard Trumka, a Pennsylvanian and former coal miner. Passing Obamacare and the union bully bill (i.e. card check) will be his top policy priorities, Trumka says. The new president promises to be more assertive than the outgoing John Sweeney. Some might use a more pointed word than “assertive” to describe the former head of the United Mine Workers:

“It says a lot about the mindset of the heads of the affiliated unions. They don’t have any qualms picking as their leader, a head of the UMW, who led a strike in 1993 that had quite a lot of violence,” said Stanley Greer, a spokesman for the National Right to Work Committee, a Springfield, Va.-based organization that opposes unions.

There is also the matter of the fracturing of the labor movement’s leadership four years ago:

Another of Trumka’s challenges will be to heal divisions inside organized labor, which split in 2005 when six major national labor unions with six million members left the AFL-CIO over a dispute with top leadership to form the rival Change to Win federation.
One of the priorities will be to “unify the (labor union) leadership at the top,” Trumka said. He plans this fall to reach out to those Change to Win unions to convince them to reunite with the AFL-CIO.
“Eighty percent of the local unions never left the AFL-CIO. The split was more with the people at the top,” he said.