Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, earlier this month called for a politically independent labor movement, indicating a definite move toward cutting off organized labor’s dependence on the political parties for advancement of wage working Americans.

For many who have been involved in organized labor and the labor movement, in general, for decades, Trumka’s new position on politics demands the answer to one question: “Where have you been?”

As head of the largest labor federation in the U.S., Trumka pointed out on the federation’s website that unions and their millions of members are largely forgotten after the flush of the campaign and election are over. And this happens time and again, but he put it more succinctly, a departure for labor leaders who usually tiptoe around the issue when speaking about this in public.

In the first week of June, Trumka spoke at a rally of hundreds of nurses who were in Washington to lobby for a financial transactions tax that could pay for social services, including a single payer health care system. “For too long,” he told the gathered nurses, “we have been left after Election Day holding a canceled check waving it about - ‘Remember us? Remember us? Remember us?’ - asking someone to pay a little attention to us. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a snootful of that s--t,” Trumka said to cheers.

It was, at the least, a signal that Trumka is set to take the unions in his federation in a different direction than the one in which they have been going for the greater part of a century. This is good, but it is a little late. Maybe not too late, but late.

Twenty years ago, Tony Mazzocchi, a leader in the then Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, founded Labor Party Advocates, which a few years later would lead to the formation of the Labor Party. By 1996, the Labor Party’s founding convention was held in Cleveland, from which the 1,400 delegates left energized and ready to organize wageworkers all across the country into a party that would truly represent the people.

Delegates from 46 states and many unions went away from Cleveland with a 16-point program for establishing economic justice in the U.S. The program included: a guarantee to “universal access to quality health care” and ensuring “everyone access to quality public education,” putting a halt to “corporate abuse of trade,” an amendment to the constitution to “guarantee everyone a job at a living wage,” putting an end to “corporate welfare as we know it,” and restoring “workers’ rights to organize, bargain, and strike.”

It was a program that addressed a litany of abuses that workers have suffered over generations, abuses that have been consolidated by Corporate America over the past quarter-century. Included in the program were the demands to end bigotry on the basis of the principle that “an injury to one is an injury to all” and a demand to “end corporate domination of elections” and to “end corporate welfare as we know it.”

The delegates to the founding convention included some of the most energetic young union and community activists to be found in the country. Most of them were active in their own unions or they had worked closely with unions in their own cities and towns. And they went to Cleveland prepared to organize a party that would truly represent the working class. They were tired of lip service from the two major parties, but particularly the Democratic Party, which they said had always welcomed their energy and money in political campaigns, but abandoned the working class when it came to protecting their livelihoods, their families, and their communities after the votes were counted.

The founding Labor Party convention was held in a period of massive removal of the U.S. manufacturing and industrial base by Corporate America. If the leaders of the opposition to the ruling class could not see what was happening, the informed delegates and thousands of their compatriots around the country did see it and were willing to act on it. Their 16-point program and the statements by the various caucuses and groups, as well as the speeches from the floor, laid out the problems for American workers and they declared their willingness to work diligently in the coming years to change the circumstances of workers’ lives in the U.S.

Those who think that today’s problems did not exist two or three decades ago should have a look at the problems and then look at the proposals the Labor Party laid out for solving the problems.

For example, the delegates declared: “We call for restoring the public sector of our economy, which has been decimated over the last few decades. We believe this country needs to protect the environment without making working people take the brunt of the pain: we need a "just transition movement" to protect both jobs and the environment.

It is as if the founding convention of the Labor Party anticipated the likes of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and the Republicans across the nation, who have launched a full-scale assault against American workers and their unions, not to mention the threat they now pose to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The delegates declared that the public sector had been “decimated” over a couple of decades. How would America’s public sector of 2011 be described by those same delegates?

The rank-and-file of trade unionists and workers, in general, have known where the country was headed economically for decades, far in advance of the people in official positions. Why was nothing done? Simply, no one seems to listen to the people, neither the politicians, nor the union officials. It was much easier for them to continue to rely on the Democrats, hoping that they would do the right thing. As we’ve seen, hope only goes so far.

It was easier to do it that way, rather than try to start a new party. It was an easy rhythm and it was comfortable. They were used to talking to one another and the mechanisms for political action were already set in stone. All that remained to be done was to fill in the spots on the phone banks with members and give the campaign money in accordance with the rules. Not all, but much, of the money went to Democrats. But then, where were working men and women to turn? To the Republicans, who as we clearly know in 2011, were out to cut off the working class (and the middle class) at the knees?

Although there were several active and effective unions, which were part of the Labor Party structure, the larger unions, the participation of which was vital to the formation of a party of working people, did not so much act in a hostile manner to the Labor Party’s founding, as pointedly ignored it. The effect was pretty much the same as working to actively kill it.

If they discussed it at all, it was in the confines of their inner circles, away from their own rank-and-file members, most of whom likely never heard of the Labor Party. The death of Mazzocchi a few years later, along with the (hard fought) decision at the subsequent constitutional convention in Pittsburgh not to run candidates at any level until there was a stronger, more well informed constituency, combined to sound the death knell for the nascent party. There continue to be a few Labor Party organizations in the country.

For those who were involved in the union movement at that time and who believed that a Labor Party might begin to solve some of the country’s problems, Trumka’s announcement that the federation is going to take a turn toward more political independence is good news. How much cooperation he can expect to receive from the major unions that could not bear to say the words “Labor Party” 15 or 20 years ago is something yet to be determined.

Considering today’s problems of wage working Americans, whose representatives in Washington seem to have abandoned them (if not attempted to shut off all hope for a decent life), it is important to remember that all of these problems were around for the delegates to ponder, discuss, and debate at the Labor Party’s convention, and long before that.

At that time, the problems that might have been solved more easily than they can be solved today are going to be very difficult, since both the economic and political structures of 2011 give workers little power to solve the problems themselves. A Labor Party would have given them a way to begin to solve the problems.

Rich Trumka may be fed up with the “benign neglect” that has been demonstrated by the political parties over his tenure at the AFL-CIO, but workers, union and non-union, have been fed up with politics as usual for a lot longer. Unfortunately, acting out of the desperation that is afoot in America today is not as good as dealing with problems before they become disasters. Millions are in crisis and politicians are not acting as if there is a crisis.

If Trumka is able to move organized labor (not forgetting that there is now a second labor federation) away from its old ways, there may be some hope for workers who have been displaced in the American economy and some hope for young people, as well. How he will deal with the break without having a political alternative like the Labor Party is another matter. That he is taking the initiative is a good first step, but he is walking a path that is a sharp departure for organized labor since the dawn of the New Deal. He could talk to the organizers of the Labor Party about the path ahead.

As the delegates said at the Cleveland convention: “Our Labor Party understands that our struggle for democracy pits us against a corporate elite that will fight hard to retain its powers and privileges. This is the struggle of our generation. The future of our children and their children hangs in the balance. It is a struggle we cannot afford to lose.”

(Disclosure: The writer was a delegate to the founding Labor Party convention in Cleveland.)

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.