EU electric vehicle push needs 80 billion euros for chargers: industry group

By Kate Abnett and Nick Carey

© Reuters/David W Cerny FILE PHOTO:

 An electric car is charged by a mobile charging station on a street in Prague

BRUSSELS/LONDON (Reuters) - An EU plan for a fifty-fold increase in electric cars this decade to help cut greenhouse gas emissions will require an 80 billion euro ($96.5 billion) investment in charging points to support it, power industry group Eurelectric said on Tuesday.

The European Union has said it needs 30 million or more zero-emission cars on its roads by 2030 as part of efforts to cut emissions by at least 55% this decade versus 1990 levels.

The bloc had about 615,000 such vehicles at the end of 2019, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association.

They are powered by fewer than 250,000 public electric vehicle charging points, which must rise to 3 million by 2030 to meet the green goals, according to a report by Eurelectric - which represents national electricity associations and leading companies - and Ernst & Young (EY).

Expanding the charging infrastructure will require 20 billion euros for public chargers and 60 billion euros for private ones, the report said.

That rollout is currently "well below target", it added, echoing concerns raised by auto industry groups.

The power industry group said by 2030 the EU will have 10.5 million electric vehicles in fleets operated by companies or public authorities. Europe's 63-million-strong vehicle fleets today include only 420,000 electric vehicles.

Surging e-commerce amid the coronavirus pandemic has added fresh impetus to a race to develop electric vans and trucks, as there are relatively few models available today.

Eurelectric also called for the EU to impose mandatory requirements for carmakers to sell zero-emissions vehicles. The EU has used CO2 emissions standards for cars to promote electric vehicle sales in recent years, and later this year will propose tightening those standards to speed the shift to clean transport.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett, Nick Carey; editing by John Stonestreet)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

German lawmakers turn sights on finance ministers in Wirecard fraud fiasco

By John O'Donnell and Tom Sims

© Reuters/HANNIBAL HANSCHKE FILE PHOTO: 

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz attends a session 

at the lower house of parliament in Berlin

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Fresh from toppling the head of Germany's top financial regulator last week, lawmakers are turning their fire on finance minister Olaf Scholz and his deputy Joerg Kukies.

As their inquiry into the collapse of Wirecard gathers pace, it has put Germany's biggest fraud centre stage in national elections in which Scholz wants to stand for chancellor.

"The focus of the parliamentary inquiry will more and more shift to the role of Scholz and his ministry," Florian Toncar, a lawmaker involved in the investigation said.

The inquiry into the implosion of a payments company which was once worth $28 billion and hailed as a German success story has embarrassed the country's governing centrist coalition.

Scholz and Kukies, who deny responsibility for failings which led to Wirecard's collapse, have responded with reforms to the structure and leadership of financial watchdog BaFin.

They presented further details on Tuesday, including plans to make it more agile in responding to whistleblowers, giving the agency, Scholz said, "more bite". [L8N2K83ND]

But lawmakers are growing impatient, with some such as Danyal Bayaz saying Scholz has been slow to respond.

"The tough questions about political responsibilities only start now," Fabio De Masi, one of the lawmakers driving a parliamentary inquiry into the affair, told Reuters.

Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD) have been in a coalition government with Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) for years and he hopes to succeed her as chancellor in elections later this year following her decision to retire.

But the SPD is struggling with voters, polling a distant third behind the CDU and the Greens, while criticism of Scholz is also emanating from within Merkel's party.

"Consequences for the finance ministry are now overdue," CDU parliamentarian Hans Michelbach said.

KUKIES CONNECTIONS

Kukies' role has also come under close scrutiny and lawmakers have highlighted multiple discussions he held with regulators, Wirecard executives, bankers and others.

The Finance Ministry said these were part of his job.

Lawmakers say they also want to examine a 100 million euro ($121 million) loan to Wirecard by a subsidiary of state bank KfW in September 2018, some two years before its collapse.

One person with knowledge of the matter told Reuters that the money was unsecured and that 90% of the loan by KfW's IPEX bank had been written off.

The finance ministry said that the bank's supervisory board, on which Kukies sat, was not involved and learned of the loan only in the middle of last year.

The lawmakers are also calling for details of communications between Kukies and the CEO of Goldman Sachs in Germany, his former employer, De Masi said.

Goldman Sachs declined to comment, referring to Wolfgang Fink's statement that he had no contact with officials on Wirecard.

The Finance Ministry also said there had been no contact.

German lawmakers are not the only ones to see the root cause of BaFin's problems in the finance ministry, a weakness also flagged by European regulators last year.

Hans-Peter Burghof, a professor at the University of Hohenheim, said the ministry had years ago hired many of the agency's top staff. "They lost this spirit of independence."

($1 = 0.8288 euros)

(Additional reporting by Patricia Uhlig in Frankfurt, Christian Kraemer and Michael Nienaber in Berlin; Editing by Alexander Smith)

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Google to spend $3.8 million to settle accusations of hiring, pay biases

By Paresh Dave

 Reuters/Carlo Allegri FILE PHOTO:

 A Google sign is pictured on a Google building

OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's Google will spend $3.8 million, including $2.6 million in back pay, to settle allegations that it underpaid women and unfairly passed over women and Asians for job openings, the U.S. Department of Labor said on Monday.

The allegations stemmed from a routine compliance audit several years ago required by Google's status as a supplier of technology to the federal government.

Google said it was pleased to have resolved the matter.

The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs had found "preliminary indicators" that Google from 2014 to 2017 at times underpaid 2,783 women in its software engineering group in Mountain View, California, and the Seattle area.

Investigators also found hiring rate differences that disadvantaged women and Asian candidates during the year ended Aug. 31, 2017, for software engineering roles in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, California, and Kirkland, Washington.

The settlement includes $2.6 million in back pay to 5,500 employees and job candidates and calls on Google to review hiring and salary practices.

Google also will set aside $1.25 million for pay adjustments for engineers in Mountain View, Kirkland, Seattle and New York over the next five years, according to the settlement. Any unused funds will be spent on diversity efforts at Google.

The company already conducts annual pay audits, but like other big tech companies, it remains under public scrutiny for a workforce that does not reflect the country's makeup in terms of race and gender.

The company said in a statement, "We believe everyone should be paid based upon the work they do, not who they are, and invest heavily to make our hiring and compensation processes fair and unbiased."

(Reporting by Paresh Dave in Oakland, Calif.; Editing by Leslie Adler and Matthew Lewis)

CANADIAN SUES TYSON FOODS

Lawsuit says Tyson Foods misled shareholders about COVID-19 protocols

By Jonathan Stempel 

l

© Reuters/Ross Courtney FILE PHOTO: 

Fog shrouds the Tyson slaughterhouse in Burbank, Washington

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. meat and poultry processor Tyson Foods Inc was sued on Tuesday for allegedly defrauding shareholders with misleading disclosures about its ability to combat the spread of the coronavirus in its facilities.

The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, was filed in Brooklyn federal court by Mingxue Guo, who lives in Canada, and seeks unspecified damages for Tyson shareholders from March 13 to Dec. 15, 2020.

It followed a Dec. 15 letter from New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that asked the regulator to investigate Tyson's health and safety disclosures to investors, which include the $229 billion New York City Retirement Systems.

Tyson's share price fell 2.2% on Dec. 15 and 8.5% over five trading days after Stringer accused the company of "flagrantly misrepresenting its poor pandemic response," and called on the SEC to probe Tyson's claims it had been adhering to federal safety guidelines.

Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson defended the company's handling of the pandemic, saying it has spent more than $500 million on employee safety, including coronavirus tests on thousands of workers a week.

"Our top priority will always be the health and safety of our people," Mickelson said.

Stringer's letter to the SEC cited reports that Tyson had more than three times as many COVID-19 cases--11,087 as of Dec. 3--and twice as many deaths as any other meatpacking company.

Tyson employed about 139,000 people as of Dec. 14 and is based in Springdale, Arkansas.

Other defendants in the lawsuit include Tyson Chief Executive Dean Banks, his predecessor and current Vice Chairman Noel White, and Chief Financial Officer Stewart Glendinning.

The case is Guo v Tyson Foods Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, No. 21-00552.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Sam Holmes)

Trump's new lawyers have Canadian connections — through Mafia boss and Bill Cosby victim


Both U.S. lawyers named as Donald Trump’s defence team for his second impeachment trial have important Canadian connections: one defended Montreal Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto against racketeering murder charges and the other was the prosecutor who declined to pursue sex assault charges against Bill Cosby after the first accusations against the comedian were filed by a Canadian woman.

© Provided by National Post U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he arrives at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., Jan. 20, 2021.

David Schoen is an accomplished civil rights and criminal lawyer based in Alabama known for his fierce advocacy. He certainly was vocal in his defence of Vito Rizzuto, who was the most powerful Mafia boss in Canada when Schoen represented him in a Brooklyn court.

Schoen was handpicked picked in 2006 by the Rizzuto family after interviewing several attorneys; he was the one they liked the best, National Post was told at the time.

)“In my view, there is no need or valid reason whatsoever for Mr. Rizzuto to be incarcerated in a jail in Brooklyn, or anywhere. He is no risk of flight whatsoever and certainly no danger to anyone in any community,” Schoen said before Rizzuto’s trial for three gangland murders. The messy 1981 slayings became a rich part of underworld lore and were recreated in the movie Donnie Brasco, starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp.

After Rizzuto’s guilty plea and sentencing, Schoen continued his strong advocacy. “I think he was penalized very unfairly,” he said. Even after Rizzuto’s death in 2013 Schoen spoke up for his former client, saying: “He was a very honorable man.”

Loyalty is a quality the former U.S. president likely admires.

Schoen did not return a request for an interview prior to deadline, Tuesday. He told his hometown newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that Trump personally called him about the job.

“I was flattered he asked me, and I’m honored to represent him,” Schoen is quoted as saying. He is not ordinarily placed “in that category” of a Trump supporter. Last year he won a suit to get a candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation on the presidential ballot and he is widely lauded for his civil rights work.

© Phil Carpenter/Postmedia Mob boss Vito Rizzuto, during his arrest in Montreal in 2004.

Schoen likely came into Trump’s orbit when he represented Roger Stone, a Republican strategist and longtime friend and advisor to Trump. Stone was convicted in 2019 of witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding and five counts of making false statements, but was pardoned by Trump as his presidency drew to a close.

Now that Schoen is representing Trump, his connection with another former client is making headlines: Jeffrey Epstein.

Schoen had met with the man accused of underage sex trafficking several times to discuss leading his defence team. They last met for five hours mapping out a legal strategy a few days before Epstein died in jail, ruled a suicide but with lingering questions.

“I think it was homicide, but I don’t know who killed him,” Schoen earlier said in a Discovery Channel documentary.

Trump’s legal team quits 10 days before impeachment trial in clash over defence strategy

QAnon shaman turns against Trump, says he would testify that president incited Capitol riots

Schoen’s co-lead counsel, Bruce L. Castor, Jr., is a former District Attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where Cosby lived and is best known for declining to prosecute the now-disgraced comedian.

The eventual unmasking of Cosby, who was a towering cultural figure, began in 2005, when a woman in Pickering, Ont., east of Toronto, reported a sexual assault to her local police.

Andrea Constand said Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her at his home the year before, when she was working at Temple University in Philadelphia, where Cosby was on the school’s Board of Trustees.

Her accusations were looked into by Castor’s office, but charges were not laid. Castor has defended his decision.

© MATT ROURKE This photo combination shows Andrea Constand, left, walking to the courtroom during Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial on June 6, 2017, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa.; and Bill Cosby, right, arriving for his sexual assault trial on June 16, 2017, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa.

“My instinct tells me he did molest Andrea Constand and my instinct tells me he was getting away with it for a long time,” Castor told National Post in an interview in 2014.

“I had to make a decision based on what the law requires.”

In 2018, Cosby was eventually convicted of assaulting Constand after dozens of other women came forward with similar accusations.

Castor did not respond for a request for an interview but released a written statement through Trump’s office.

“I consider it a privilege to represent the 45th president. The strength of our constitution is about to be tested like never before in our history,” Castor said. “It will triumph over partisanship yet again.”

Trump said Schoen and Castor bring “national profiles and significant trial experience in high-profile cases,” in a written statement.

Trump’s second impeachment trial begins in the Senate next week on a charge that he unleashed an insurrection when his supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, trying to prevent Joe Biden being officially declared the winner of the presidential election.

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys

RACIST MONTEAL COPS
Some Montreal essential workers feel they’re being harassed by police after curfew
Benson Cook 

Some Montreal essential workers feel they’re being harassed by police after curfew

A number of essential workers, allowed to be out after 8 p.m. under the rules of Quebec's nightly curfew, say they feel police are focusing more on stopping them each and every night than nabbing rule-breakers who don't have a legitimate reason to be outside. 

© Global News UberEats logo.

Ride-share and food-delivery services like Uber and DoorDash are considered essential, and drivers for those services are allowed to be out. Uber has issued official documentation to its Quebec employees to be shown if they're stopped by police after curfew.

Gaurav Sharma, a recent immigrant to Canada, has been working for Uber's food-delivery service UberEats since August of 2020. He says even on the nights he's not stopped by police, he sees countless other UberEats drivers stopped.

"Not (just) me, every person," he says of the problem.

While he always has his essential-worker documentation ready when he's stopped, Sharma says that alone isn't always enough to satisfy officers. Many, he says, have inspected his car, or asked him how often he maintains it.

Each stop usually takes approximately 15 minutes, he says, which can create headaches when he's supposed to be en route to pick up or deliver food for customers, work he says has been sparse relative to before the curfew was imposed.

Advocates like Mostafa Henaway of the Immigrant Workers Centre say Sharma's far from alone.

"We're seeing places that are targeted (by police) that are a bit odd, right?" Henaway said. "We know in the first instance of GoodFood, where workers received tickets outside of their workplace, who were working the evening and night shift."

The incident Henaway is referring to took place in the curfew's early days, in January, when several GoodFood employees were reportedly ticketed by police at a bus stop outside the company's facility on Côte-de-Liesse Road in Montreal's west end, despite showing letters from their employer.

Henaway says the problems essential workers face during police stops can be compounded when employers don't properly prepare their workers' curfew paperwork, an issue more common in industries like manufacturing, logistics and food service, where workers are often paid less in wages.

His organization has heard of instances where employers are "not printing them out for workers, they're not adding in workers' names, they're just saying 'here's a letter' in an email to workers."

Additional problems can arise, he says, when police can't verify a person's identity against any essential-worker documentation they provide, a frequent issue for recent immigrants who may not yet have a Quebec health card or driver's licence, as well as those with no immigration status at all, who aren't eligible for Quebec-issued ID cards.

Read more: Quebec curfew making life even harder for undocumented workers doing essential jobs, protesters say

Henaway says his organization is calling for the creation of municipal ID cards that wouldn't require a person to prove their immigration status to get one. A similar program exists in New York City, known as IDNYC.

In a statement sent to Global News by email, Montreal police said they cannot comment on individual cases, but said it's ultimately up to individual workers to prove their right to be out after curfew.

They added, however, that "each situation is assessed on a case-by-case basis and the police are asked to act with judgement and discernment."

Sharma says that if that's the case, though, the essential-worker letter he has from Uber should be enough, and he feels it's often not.

"I feel the police are easily not satisfied with these things," he said.

Fishing and agriculture sectors worried new travel rules will impact foreign workers

FREDERICTON — Fishing and farming associations in Atlantic Canada that rely on temporary foreign workers say they are worried new travel rules could have a big impact on their operations.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Canadian airlines last week agreed to suspend commercial flights from Mexico and the Caribbean until April 30 in an effort to prevent the circulation of COVID-19 variants. And as of Thursday, all international passenger flights to Canada will have to land at one of four airports, none of which is east of Montreal.

National Farmers Union in New Brunswick executive director Suzanne Fournier says the changes could delay workers' arrival to the region.

"It could limit the amount of workers able to get to New Brunswick in a timely manner," she said in an interview Tuesday.

She said about 1,500 temporary foreign workers travel to New Brunswick every year, and about 200 of them work in the agriculture sector.

"We're hopeful that (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada) is working on alleviating the pressure of accessing our workforce, especially in the Maritimes where the airports have been closed to international travel," she said.

Nova Scotia Seafood Alliance president Osborne Burke said Ottawa should have addressed temporary foreign workers when it announced the new travel restrictions last week.

"Are they going to allow charter flights, which are going to cost us significantly more per person than if it was a commercial flight? Then on top of that, our concern is there is no reference to Moncton or Halifax. They identified four international airports, but none this far east," he said in an interview Tuesday.

Burke said many processors were expecting temporary foreign workers to arrive on commercial flights on April 1 and begin two weeks of quarantine.

He said a lack of details in last week's announcement has left people in the industry with a lot of questions.

"Our best made plans are coming apart, and now we've got to figure out how we're going to get these workers," he said. "There are thousands upon thousands of temporary foreign workers who come in the peak season for agriculture and the seafood industry."

Burke said he understands the need to protect the population from COVID-19 but the restrictions could significantly increase food-processing costs.

"We don't have the labour workforce in our rural areas that we need to process, or that are willing to come to work to process, so in the peak seasons, we need the extra workers to process the product that's being landed," he said. "It's critical to the economy for everybody."

Nat Richard, executive director of the Lobster Processors Association, based in Moncton, N.B., said the travel announcement caught the industry off guard.

He said it's hoped that direct charter flights will be permitted into Halifax and Moncton, but at this point he's waiting for clarity from Ottawa.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 2, 2021.

Kevin Bissett, The Canadian Press

Union alleges systemic harassment, discrimination at Veterans Affairs

OTTAWA — One of the unions representing workers at Veterans Affairs Canada is sounding the alarm over what it alleges is widespread harassment and discrimination within the department

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Union of Veterans Affairs Employees says it surveyed more than 350 of its roughly 2,700 members in the fall, and found more than one in three had experienced some form of harassment in the workplace.

Meanwhile, the union reported that nearly one in five respondents had faced some sort of discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or another factor.

“We should not be having so many instances of harassment discrimination happening within the department,” UVAE national president Virginia Vaillancourt said in an interview on Tuesday. “And some of these are at the senior executive level.”

Vaillancourt said the union, which represents front line workers and administrative staff at Veterans Affairs locations across the country, took its concerns directly to the department’s top managers.

But Vaillancourt, who said she was consulted on five discrimination cases last week alone, was unsatisfied with their answer, alleging they wanted to refer the issue to the department’s human-resources section rather than get personally involved.

“They always say that they value employees’ mental health, and that they want to ensure that people have a workplace free from harassment,” she said. “But that's not the reality of what our members are facing on a daily basis.”

The UVAE’s survey found more reported discrimination and harassment than a separate survey the government itself conducts each year.

In 2019, the wider survey found 13 per cent of Veterans Affairs employees had suffered harassment. Five per cent reported being victims of discrimination.

Both those results were a decline from the previous year.

Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Emily Gauthier noted those figures in an email on Tuesday, adding the governmentwide survey included more employees from the department than the one conducted by the UVAE.

The department has also set up a new organization to help employees facing workplace harassment or violence, Gauthier said, while training has been implemented alongside new rules banning misconduct across government.

Asked about the discrepancy between the governmentwide survey and the union’s results, Vaillancourt suggested members were more forthright to the latter because they took it more seriously and due to privacy concerns.

“We guaranteed their anonymity, where with the Public Service Employee Survey, we know the government is able to break it down into specific offices,” she said. “And if it's broken down into specific offices, there's some situations that can be identifiable.”

Veterans Affairs has faced significant pressure in recent years to deal with a growing influx of applications for assistance from former military personnel suffering from service-related illnesses and disabilities.

That influx has not been matched by added investment from the Liberals into the department, which was significantly slashed nearly a decade ago as part of the previous Conservative government’s budget-cutting efforts.

The result has been an explosion in wait times for services and delays in the processing of applications, which has resulted in a massive backlog that has become a source of anger for veterans and a black eye to the government and the department.

Vaillancourt said most of the harassment and discrimination reported by staff originated from within Veterans Affairs, including from supervisors and managers. Yet she said some comes from outside the department.

“We do have situations which it does involve veterans with cyberbullying and things like that,” she said. “We're still trying to deal with the department to find some sort of mechanism or process to deal cyberbullying.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 2, 2021.

Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press

Union says Bell Media cuts hit 210 employees in Toronto, half from newsrooms

CALGARY — The union representing some Bell Media workers says a total of 210 employees in the Toronto area are being laid off, with most of the notifications taking place Tuesday

.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

About 100 of the employees are union members and are connected to Toronto television newsrooms, while the non-union staff include administration and sales staff, said Howard Law, media section director for Unifor, on Tuesday.

The affected union members include field camera operators but not on-air television reporters, he said, declining to be more specific because some affected employees have not been notified yet.

"They're laying off camera operators which has to mean less news coverage, unless they expect everybody else to work twice as hard," Law said.

Some support staff are being laid off temporarily because certain local TV information shows aren't being made in-house during the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.

Bell Media wouldn't confirm the number of layoffs.

"There are further changes in roles, including some departures, reflecting Bell Media’s streamlined operating structure," said director of communications Marc Choma in an emailed response to questions from The Canadian Press.

"As the media industry evolves, we’re focused on investment in new content and technology opportunities while also ensuring our company is as agile, efficient and easy to work with as possible. That includes programming changes affecting some on-air positions, but I think it’s pretty clear by now that our policy is not to comment on individual employees."

He added departing employees will be supported with retirement or severance packages and career transition support.

Bell Media is part of BCE Inc.'s Bell Canada division, the country's largest telecommunications company. Its holdings include the CTV television network, specialty TV channels, radio stations and production studios.

In a news release Tuesday, Unifor's national office condemned the cuts being rolled out to CTV newsrooms across much of Bell Media's operations, saying the layoffs will cost the network many valued media workers just when their communities need them most.

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, Canadians have seen how important a strong media sector is to their continued health and safety,” said Unifor national president Jerry Dias.

“These cuts go against the assurances made by the broadcasters last summer to the CRTC (the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) to stand by local news.”

It stated that Bell Media had laid off all of the staff in the newsroom of Montreal radio station CJAD.

Bell Media confirmed last month it had restructured its leadership team leading to some staff departures.

Shortly after Wade Oosterman took over as Bell Media's president, it parted ways with president of content and programming Michael Cosentino, senior vice-president of original programming Cornelia Coe and vice-president of regulatory affairs, content and distribution Kevin Goldstein.

The changes come as Bell Media puts greater priority on growing its streaming platforms.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 2, 2021.

Companies in this story: (TSX:BCE)

Dan Healing, The Canadian Press

REST IN POWER

Former AFL-CIO President; Brother John Sweeney dies at age 86

© Provided by The Canadian Press

WASHINGTON — John Sweeney, who spent 14 years steering the AFL-CIO through a time of declining union membership and rising internal dissent, has died. He was 86.

He died on Monday at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, AFL-CIO communications deputy director Carolyn Bobb said. The cause of his death wasn't immediately disclosed.

Sweeney was credited with transforming the nation’s largest labour federation into a political powerhouse more firmly aligned with the Democratic Party, as well as with civil rights, environmental and anti-poverty groups.

After stepping down as president of the labour federation in 2009, Sweeney served as the AFL-CIO’s president emeritus, offering advice to the group’s executive council, delivering speeches and taking on other discrete assignments.

The AFL-CIO's current president, Richard Trumka, said of Sweeney in a statement: “John was a great leader and true innovator, driving the labour movement forward. We stand on that foundation today as we take on the challenges of inequality, systemic racism and much more.”

Born in New York City, Sweeney was the son of working-class Irish immigrants, his father a bus driver and his mother a maid. His mother’s job cleaning houses made him sympathetic to the plight of low-wage workers, while his interest in organized labour grew during trips to union meetings with his father.

“Growing up, I saw what the union meant for my father,” Sweeney said in a 2013 speech. “The union won him the wage increases that let him save up $5,000 to buy a home — outside the city, in a promised land called Yonkers.”

After graduating from Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, Sweeney started work as a clerk for IBM. But he soon took a pay cut to become a researcher at the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

Sweeney later moved to the Service Employees International Union, becoming the head of a 70,000-member New York City local. He became president of the entire union in 1980, nearly doubling its membership over the next 15 years from 625,000 to 1.1 million. His successes included the rowdy Justice for Janitors organizing campaign, though much of the SEIU’s growth came through mergers with smaller unions.

In 1995, Sweeney and several other union presidents unhappy with what they saw as the AFL-CIO’s lacklustre leadership forced the resignation of AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland. Sweeney later ran for the post and defeated Kirkland’s hand-picked successor, Thomas Donahue, in the federation’s first contested election.

“I have deep suspicions that we are becoming irrelevant to many of our own members,” Sweeney complained in surprisingly blunt terms during a 1995 speech.

When he came into the office, union membership had already shrunk to about 15% of the nation’s workforce. He pledged to beef up organizing and rebuild unions into the force they were in the 1950s, when about 1 in 3 workers was in a union.

Sweeney did build up the AFL-CIO’s political arm into a more effective machine for electing union-friendly officials at the federal, state and local level. The federation launched voter registration drives and expanded get-out-the vote efforts. Sweeney also started Working America, an AFL-CIO affiliate for people who didn't have a union at work. It now boasts more than 3 million members.

But overall union membership continued to decline on Sweeney’s watch, as the nation lost millions of manufacturing jobs and employers grew more resistant to union organizers. The losses led to more frustration by leaders who believed politics had become paramount at the expense of organizing new workers. The discontent boiled over after President George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, despite the millions of dollars unions had spent trying to help Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

In 2005, several unions, led by the Teamsters and Service Employees, left the AFL-CIO to form a rival federation called Change to Win. The move damaged the AFL-CIO’s political heft and sapped millions of dollars in dues from its budget.

Despite the rift, Sweeney was reelected to another four-year term as president of the AFL-CIO. He was seen as a stabilizing force for the federation of 57 unions representing about 9 million workers.

“I loved what I did,” he said in a 2011 interview upon being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour. “I told my kids all the time how happy I was with my work. And, sure, there was a strike once in a while or something. That was really troubling. But, for the most part, satisfying working people was a mission that I had.”

Sweeney is survived by his wife, Maureen Sweeney; his son, John Sweeney Jr.; his daughter, Patricia Sweeney; a granddaughter, Kennedy Moore; and two sisters, Cathy Hammill and Peggy King. A brother, James Sweeney, died before him.

___

Biographical material in this story was written by former Associated Press writer Sam Hananel.

Dino Hazell, The Associated Press