Maine labor chieftain outlines his approach toward creating more jobs for Maine workers

Maine needs more jobs, and state leaders need to develop a long-range job-training policy to assure meaningful work for its labor force into the next century, according to Charles O’Leary, president of the 55,000-member AFL-CIO. The state’s unemployment rate was 7.2 percent as of December 1991, the latest figure available from the Department of Labor. An estimated 46,300 workers were unemployed, a statistic that assured the top concern of labor for 1992, according to O’Leary.

“The key issue for labor is jobs, getting people back to work,” said O’Leary. He is eyeing the Great Northern-Bowater proposal to build a newspaper recycling plant for the East Millinocket paper mill as a way to get jobs for many of the unemployed construction workers in his organization, O’Leary said.

In his 13th year as head of the state’s largest labor organization, O’Leary said his job has grown in complexity and yet, he says, his greatest satisfaction is helping the workers he represents.

He labeled as “hogwash” the recently published Japanese sentiments about American workers’ being lazy and illiterate.

“I know factually that’s not true,” said O’Leary. A former Fulbright scholar, O’Leary said a professional paper written last year by labor experts at the University of Maine proves that American workers “are among the most highly skilled and the most productive in the world.”

But, being skilled and productive doesn’t assure anyone of a job these days. O’Leary admitted the state’s employment picture is grim. “Some of the locals run at 75 to 80 percent unemployed for a long period. These are workers who travel outside the state and they haven’t been able to find work anywhere,” said O’Leary.

A three-pronged approach involving education, labor and political institutions is what is needed to solve Maine’s present and future employment problems, according to O’Leary.

He talked of the need to tap the state’s vocational-technical college system, which, O’Leary said, should be groomed for a leadership role in training Maine workers for a secure future.

“We’re trying to work more closely with the vocational-technical colleges to make sure we train people for future jobs without prejudicing existing jobs. We shouldn’t be training electricians, for example, when we have 1,500 unemployed electricians statewide,” O’Leary said.

He spoke of the need for more health-care workers — radiologists, therapists, nurses — which the vocational-technical college system could train.

His confidence in the six-campus technical college system is countered by O’Leary’s expressed disappointment in the federally funded Job Training and Partnership Act.

The 8-year-old JTPA program retrains unemployed workers. It pumps $26 million in federal dollars into the state annually, according to O’Leary.

“There’s been a lot of talk and fluff, but not much training that resulted in good jobs” through JTPA, O’Leary said. He expressed concern with a large number of JTPA graduates working at minimum-wage jobs with no health benefits.

Other issues on the labor agenda, O’Leary said, include:

Promotion of nationalized health care. Maine needs only to look at Canada to find advantages to a national health-care system, O’Leary said. A Canadian resident told O’Leary “one of the things about our health-care system is when we pay taxes we get something for it,” O’Leary recalled. The stories are not true, for the most part, about Canadians standing in line for treatment from uncaring physicians or of Canadians coming to America for improved health care, O’Leary said. “The majority (of Canadians) are happy with the health care system, I would say, much more than Americans are happy with our health care system.”

Improved workplace safety standards and tougher environmental laws.

Investigation of insurance companies’ roles in the Workers’ Compensation crisis. “The tactic continues to be not to look at the overall negligence of the insurance industry and the profitmaking that is taking place. They (business, industry and some legislators) simply focus on cutting benefits to injured workers. Nobody wants to be injured on the job. Despite the popular myth it’s never a good deal to be injured. You don’t get two-thirds of your wage replacement in Maine anymore, you get more like half,” O’Leary said.

Cooperative efforts with business and industry to solve a pending crisis with the state’s unemployment fund.

The Maine AFL-CIO is a combination of two unions. The American Federation of Labor, which represented bricklayers and craftspeople, formed in 1891 in Maine. The Congress of Industrial Orgnizations, representing industry, formed in the 1930s and the two groups united into the AFL-CIO in 1956.

The group’s membership now consists of a core of papermakers and shipbuilders and about 15,000 public employees including, state, municipal and county workers, who signed on a few years ago.

O’Leary said the Maine membership stays in the area of 50,000 to 55,000. Despite hard times, its membership has not suffered like labor organizations out of state, yet O’Leary said the AFL-CIO sustained big membership losses when the state’s poultry and shoe industries failed.

On a given day, O’Leary’s duties might range from meeting with state political leaders to going into a mill to talk with workers. He might fly to Washington, D.C., to talk with members of Congress or to Boston, as he did recently, to speak to a group at Harvard.

He rarely loses sight of his main job.

“It’s the workers, it’s when I get out and meet workers in the paper mills and state employees and building trades people who go to work everyday. I know, because of what we do, it’s benefited them,” O’Leary said.