[trumka_timer]
Recently, the AFL-CIO and its president Richard Trumka publicly challenged Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint to a debate about raising the minimum wage. DeMint passed, offering up the Foundation’s labor policy specialist instead, but Trumka and his union said no deal and pushed out the message that “DeMint Won’t Debate.”
But were Trumka’s tactics just a bluff? It now appears so. The Employment Policies Institute responded to Trumka’s invitation with a letter of its own, accepting the invitation to debate and offering either the Institute’s research director or executive director for the occasion. So far, the response from the AFL-CIO has been crickets.
We’ve started a clock to track the number of days that have elapsed since we first accepted Trumka’s invitation to debate.
We’ve also created a mobile billboard that asks whether Trumka is too chicken to debate us.
We’ll see if the AFL CIO is willing to publicly defend its position on wage hikes—or whether the original debate challenge was just bluster.