Tomorrow, John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO and its most progressive president, well, ever, will step down after 14 years of service. Taking his place will be his long-time second-in-command, Richard Trumka, formerly of the United Mine Workers, a rough-and-tumble labor leader who has promoted a more “aggressive” labor movement. 

Trumka gained a lot of attention last year with a fiery election-year speech denouncing racism among union members. Usually, the labor world is pretty airtight. Something HUGE can happen in there and people on the outside won’t hear a thing. This time, 550,000 people watched the speech on YouTube, and even Andrew Sullivan, who doesn’t seem to realize unions exist, gave it a link.

Trumka’s pre-Obama history is less well-known and just as interesting. Thomas Geoghegan, author of a brilliant labor memoir, knew Trumka as a player in a reform movement, Miners for Union Democracy, that swept out the United Mine Workers corrupt (and murderous) old guard.  He shared a secretary with the young Trumka, and Geoghegan envied his officemate’s easy manner with the rank and file members:

“He was no different than me, really, but he was the son of a miner and he had been in the mines. Rich Trumka was just as much a Washingtonian as I was, but he was a miner. The miners could pour out their hearts to him and call him ‘buddy,’ and he could call them ‘buddy’ back.

And I couldn’t, and that’s what annoyed the hell out of me. [O]ne night, Rich and another miner taught me how to chew tobacco. They leaned their chairs against the wall, and they chewed and spit in long arcing freethrows into [a wastebasket] across the room.

I had to get up, walk across, lean over the basket, and drool.”  

But Geoghegan’s blissful days of drooling tobacco juice were numbered. No one remembers this now, but as the rank-and-file miners got a taste of democracy in the mid-70s, they decided they weren’t going to take anymore crap—from anyone. They stood up to their old union bosses, then their employers, and then, when the courts got involved, they struck against them, too. “For two years in the middle of the 1970s almost all the coal miners in America were engaged in a strike against the U.S. government,” which resulted in an injunction a day and millions of dollars of fines. As Geoghgan remembers in his memoir, the young turks, including Trumka and himself, who’d taken over the D.C. HQ of the UMW, couldn’t control the rank-and-file and they were turned out in disgrace.

 “Rich Trumka told me he was going back into the mines. I didn’t know what to say to Rich. He was young enough to go into the mines, I suppose, but my God…I knew he had vague political ambitions, which seemed quite stranger and farfetched to me…”

Not too farfetched as it turned out. Five years later the young turks were back, with Trumka at their head.

“Trumka became president in 1981. And today the UMW is probably the stablest, most adult, most democratic union in all of labor,” Geoghegan reflected. 14 years later, Trumka was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO on Sweeney’s reformist ticket that replaced the Cold War-era old guard with a new progressive leadership. Tomorrow, he’ll be president of the largest labor federation in the country. I can’t think of a better guy for it.

Now if you want to discuss how much he’ll actually be able to get done, that’s a different story. The institutional and historical restraints binding him are tough. The AFL-CIO doesn’t actually command much power over its members and organizing new members is excruciatingly difficult. Neither of these encumbrances can be blamed on Trumka (although their effects will be anyway), but as we saw under Sweeney they can hobble even the best of intentions.