UPDATED: AFL-CIO president’s lecture at U of M canceled

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka (right) will speak in Minneapolis Feb. 20.

UPDATED 02/20/14 – AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s lecture scheduled for tonight at the University of Minnesota has been canceled as a result of the weather.

“President Trumka’s flight into Minneapolis has been canceled due to the bad weather systems across the country,” said Kent Love-Ramirez, director of communications for the U’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “We apologize and hope to be able to re-schedule this event in the future.”

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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will appear Feb. 20 in Minneapolis as part of a series of events produced by the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs to mark the 50th anniversary of passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Trumka, who leads the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, will give a lecture entitled “Free At Last? On the 100th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, Where Will We Be?”

The speech, scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. in the Cowles Auditorium, 301 19th Ave. S., is free and open to the public. Click here to register.

The Humphrey School announced the event today:

Half a century ago, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, fundamentally changed America. King championed the workers’ cause, and his words and impassioned work led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the United States, examines the connection between labor rights and civil rights. Trumka, a third-generation coal miner, argues for policy efforts to better ensure the right to vote, to guarantee unemployment insurance and a higher minimum wage, and changes in criminal justice to reduce levels of incarceration.

Trumka’s election to president of the AFL-CIO followed 15 years of service as the organization’s secretary-treasurer and capped his rise to leadership from humble beginnings in a small mining community in southwest Pennsylvania. As a young boy troubled by how mine workers were treated during the 1960s, Trumka told his grandfather he could grow up to be a lawyer and “stand up for workers’ rights.” He was elected president of the AFL-CIO by acclamation in 2009 and re-elected by delegates in 2013.