BY TONY DUTROW
PITTSBURGH - Two days before the national convention of the AFL-CIO, leaders of the 13 million member labor federation hosted a national conference here on union organizing. More than 300 delegates and guests, including rank-and-file unionists fresh from the battle fields of union organizing campaigns, participated in the September 20 organizing conference.

During the course of the meeting, workers described their experiences with company victimizations and government inaction in the face of blatant violations of labor laws - firings, violent attacks by company thugs and other forms of retaliation used by the bosses to intimidate workers who come forward to establish unions. Fighters spoke of battles they were involved in, including the ongoing campaign to organize farm workers in the strawberry fields of California and the effort to unionize one of the largest hog slaughtering facilities in the country, located in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

Maribel Hernández, a restroom attendant at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas explained in Spanish how 5,000 workers won union recognition there by forcing the hotel to recognize the union authorization cards as proof of majority support for the union.

Las Vegas is also the focus of a plan to organize the building trades. These unionists have stepped up their outreach for support, including to the largely immigrant workforce in the hotels. Several workers who arrived on the second day of the convention have been on strike against the Las Vegas Frontier Hotel since 1991. They shared the platform September 24 with dozens of Teamsters from UPS who won their 15-day strike against the largest package handler in the United States.

Another focus of the convention is the effort by the AFL- CIO to "build labor/community coalitions." As part of this, the Community-Labor Planning Committee for the AFL-CIO convention organized a teach-in September 21. Close to 300 people were at the "Labor is Back" event, held at the University of Pittsburgh. Workshops included "Working Women and the Unions" and "Diversity Shouldn't Mean Divided." Keynote speakers there were AFL-CIO executive vice president Linda Chavez-Thompson and Richard Trumka, the secretary- treasurer of the labor federation. A half dozen similar teach- ins have been held around the country, from Columbia University in New York City to the University of California at Los Angeles leading up to the AFL-CIO convention.

Also held as part of the convention activities, the Community-Labor Planning Committee for the AFL-CIO convention arranged to dedicate three historical markers in Pittsburgh, indicating important benchmarks in the history of the working class in the United States and its fight for industrial unions.

Early Tuesday morning, delegates were bussed to the site where the 1877 Great Rail Strike began for a dedication there. Rail bosses of the Baltimore & Ohio and Pennsylvania RR called in the state militia to put down a rebellion of rail workers in Pittsburgh protesting a 10 percent pay cut and imposition of an unacceptable work load. Ultimately the struggle was lost, and on one of the bloodiest days in Pittsburgh an estimated 40 workers died.

About 50 delegates and guests took part in a similar unveiling of the historical marker at the Martin Luther King, Jr. elementary school, which is built on the spot where the first CIO convention was held in 1938.

On September 24, another marker was dedicated in downtown Pittsburgh in front of the posh Westin William Penn Hotel that now stands on the spot where the precursor to the AFL was founded in 188l.

Democratic Party politician Jesse Jackson, who is addressing the convention September 25, is scheduled to lead a march of the delegates from the convention to downtown Pittsburgh in a March and Rally for Good Jobs.  
 
 
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