Unions Map ‘Make Wall Street Pay’ Blitz on Goldman (Update2)

March 11 (Bloomberg) -- AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka listened to Andres and Esteban Contreras tell how Andres moved back home to help with rent and medical care after their father lost his job and their mother had her hours cut.

Did they realize, Trumka asked, that Wall Street bankers gave their employees $16.2 billion in bonuses? “If you and your fellow workers had a chance to talk to some of those Wall Street people, what would they say?” Trumka asked.

“How can you look in the face of a real working man,” Esteban Contreras said. The community activists listening at the union hall in Orlando, Florida, last week booed and hissed.

Trumka, head of the nation’s largest union organization, is hoping to tap into that kind of anger at Wall Street with two weeks of protests aimed at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the most profitable securities firm in U.S. history, and the country’s five other largest banks. The AFL-CIO says it plans 200 events covering all 50 states, starting March 15.

“Wall Street has become a symbol of greed run amok, and what labor is doing here is seeking to demonstrate that it is speaking for working families generally, union member or non- union member,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Tax on Securities

At the “Make Wall Street Pay” rallies, which the AFL-CIO announced today, union members will push for a transaction tax on securities trading to help pay for the $900 billion they want the government to spend on creating new jobs. That’s 60 times the $15 billion approved by the Senate last month. The House of Representatives last week passed an $18 billion measure.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said he opposes the transaction tax, though Trumka says it has support in the White House. He declined to say who the backers are.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobbying groups, opposes the tax, which it says would hurt more than Wall Street bankers. “It’s really a nest-egg tax, a mutual-fund tax,” Charles Jones, an economics professor at Columbia Business School in New York, said on a Chamber of Commerce conference call with reporters today to discuss opposition to the measure.

Lucas van Praag, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs in New York, declined to comment on the AFL-CIO’s plans.

Wells Fargo Comments

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. “recognizes Americans are demanding more from their financial institutions during these difficult economic times” and is “committed to serving the financial needs of businesses and individuals, keeping credit flowing, and working to help those in financial distress find solutions,” spokeswoman Julia Tunis Bernard said.

The unions also plan protests at Bank of America Corp., based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and New York-based banks JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley.

Bank of America spokeswoman Kelly Sapp declined to comment on the protests, as did Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Jeanmarie McFadden and JPMorgan’s Jennifer Zuccarelli.

A Citigroup spokesman, Stephen Cohen, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Labor unions have failed to achieve some of their top goals since Democrats, their traditional political allies, took control of the White House and Congress. Their principal legislative priority, the so-called card-check bill making it easier to organize, has stalled, even though President Barack Obama embraced it during his presidential campaign.

Health Insurance, NLRB

Obama also pressed labor leaders to back a tax on expensive health insurance plans, including those that cover some union members, as part of an effort to overhaul health care. The National Labor Relations Board has been dormant for two years as Obama and congressional Democrats failed to get a union ally installed.

By targeting banks, unions are trying to bring energy to a labor movement that has seen its ranks dwindle. Union membership in the private sector declined in 2009 to a record low of 7.2 percent of all workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unions represented about 35 percent of the private- sector workers in the mid-1950s, and 17 percent as recently as 1983.

“Unions don’t have the clout they used to, so they need to get the general public involved, maybe even people who are not normally union supporters, and remind them they are getting the short end of the stick,” said Charles Craver, a labor professor at George Washington University in Washington.

SEIU’s Rally

The rallies are similar to efforts by the Service Employees International Union, which has been targeting big banks for years. In November, SEIU president Andy Stern staged a rally outside Goldman Sachs’s Washington office, calling for the bank to cancel its bonuses. The SEIU, with 2.2 million members, is the nation’s largest union.

“SEIU believes that big banks played a central role in crashing the economy,” said Stephen Lerner, who directs the union’s financial reform project. “We are calling on them to be part of the solution instead of increasing their own pay while making problems worse for the rest of the country.”

Ultimately, SEIU’s goal is to “change corporate behavior,” Lerner said, rather than the “narrow” objective of increasing union membership. The fact that some banks are changing how they impose overdraft fees on debit cards is a sign that the SEIU protests and other actions are working, he said.

“This not at all about how we get more members,” he said. “This is how we make the economy work for working for families, and not just for Wall Street.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Holly Rosenkrantz in Washington at hrosenkrantz@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net.