Richard Trumka Is No Martin Luther King

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka likes to brag about the access he has to the Obama White House. The White House visitor logs suggest that he almost lives there.

Perhaps this is what emboldened him to make an outrageous and self-serving statement last week that The Examiner's Byron York highlighted in his column on Friday. "April 4 [is] the day on which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for the cause of public collective bargaining," Trumka said, invoking King's legacy in the fight to preserve perks for well-compensated government workers in Wisconsin.

The comparison could not be any less appropriate. If King had been president of the United Mine Workers in 1993, he not would have made excuses for his union members' violence or for the murder of Eddie York, a strikebreaking mining contractor, in July of that year.

Trumka, on the other hand, has no qualms about strong-arm tactics, telling the Associated Press: "[I]if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you're likely to get burned." This was a barely veiled threat toward any worker who in the future fails to cooperate in his union's often-violent work stoppages.

Read more at the Washington Examiner