Two themes prevailed at the AFL-CIO's global convention held in Los Angeles. The first was a deep indignation over the unbridled growth of corporate interest and money power in American politics. The second was a quieter understanding that the unions that once anchored people power in this country must reinvent themselves to survive. That reinvention depends on a new awareness among America's workers that their fate is bound to the fate of workers worldwide.

In its new briefing paper, A Cautionary Tale: The True Cost of Austerity and Inequality in Europe, Oxfam compares Europe’s current austerity measures to the failed “structural adjustment” programs imposed on developing countries by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the 1980s and 1990s. The conclusion?  “Europe is facing a lost decade. An additional 15 [million] to 25 million people across Europe could face the prospect of living in poverty by 2025 if austerity measures continue,” says the report.

This week, the AFL-CIO held its quadrennial constitutional convention in Los Angeles. The convention had committees that included many nonunion partners to create an agenda directing the AFL-CIO toward a movement that can include the voices of all working people—those covered by collective bargaining agreements, those who are retired, those who are unemployed and those who work without the benefit of a union contract. Shared prosperity, the goal of the AFL-CIO, must be inclusive.

Delegates focused on shared prosperity, good jobs and raising wages, as the AFL-CIO 2013 Convention entered its third day in Los Angeles. 

The three working family economics resolutions that won approval this morning center on the labor movement’s vision of shared prosperity here and around the globe, the steps needed to create good jobs, economic security and tax fairness and three dozen specific actions to raise wages and put more money into workers’ pockets.

“It is time,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said to the more than 1,600 delegates from 57 unions and allies from community partners, progressive groups and global unions, for a “new and stronger movement” for working people. In his keynote address this morning to the 2013 AFL-CIO Convention, Trumka said:

What we have done yesterday cannot limit what we do tomorrow. Now is not the time to settle for small steps. If we are going to move forward, we have to challenge ourselves….This is America. It is time we value work—not wealth, not greed—work and the people who do the work.

In 2008, with the global financial crisis at its peak and the world teetering on the brink of a second Great Depression, world leaders and policymakers took decisive fiscal and monetary policy actions that bolstered our economies and stopped our financial system from spiraling into chaos and dragging our economies into depression.

But today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the “Trans-Atlantic Agenda for Shared Prosperity” economic summit: 

Our work is far from done, and no progress has been easy. We have had to battle those who wanted to block the fiscal stimulus, which was so critical for halting our economic slide. And we are still battling those same opponents who now want to impose strict fiscal austerity that threatens to sabotage our economy and trigger a new recession, as those same policies have in Europe.

The AFL-CIO Executive Council endorsed Yale Professor Jacob Hacker’s just released economic blueprint, Prosperity Economics: Building an Economy for All, that says restoring the middle class must include restoring workers’ ability to bargain collectively.

The agenda for shared prosperity builds upon an understanding of the central role of workers, their unions and collective bargaining to address the full range of our society’s economic ills—our jobs and infrastructure deficits, our housing crisis, the hollowing out of our manufacturing sector, the disconnect between wages and productivity, the health care and retirement security crisis and the particular toll that these crises have taken on communities of color and women.