At the AFL-CIO Convention in St. Louis, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka honored the imprisoned president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), Han Sang-gyun, with the George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award. Han has been in jail since December 2015, serving a three-year sentence for defending trade union rights and fighting back against corporate corruption and the repressive government of former South Korean President Park Geun-hye.

At the 2017 AFL-CIO Convention, the delegates passed a resolution calling for the creation of a Workers' Bill of Rights. Speaking in support of the resolution, President Richard L. Trumka said:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka opened the third day of the AFL-CIO 2017 Convention talking about economic rules and an independent political voice:

Policy is what shapes the economy, and too many of those policies have produced a windfall for the rich and the well-connected and doomed millions to compete for the scraps left over. 

Brothers and sisters, this must end. 

Our movement is the great equalizer in an otherwise cruel economy.

We hear a great deal about the future of work. Gig economy. Deprofessionalization. Temp, part-time and on-call work. Technology. Automation. Artificial intelligence. Digitization. Deindustrialization. Unfair trade policy and offshoring. While these changes and trends take hold, we are living in an era where the rich and powerful have rigged our economy against working families through well-financed campaigns to weaken workers’ bargaining power, pass perverse “right-to-work laws” and use the courts as a pawn to hollow out the labor movement. If the question is how we push back these ominous trends, the answer is through strong unions.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka opened the second day of the AFL-CIO 2017 Convention talking about the importance of unions to democracy:

Millennials have never lived in an America where wages are growing, or worked in an economy where hard work and productivity blazed a trail into the middle class. They have never experienced an economy where more than 1 in 10 workers have the freedom to belong to a union and bargain together. The American idea that anything is possible if you work hard and play by the rules simply does not exist for many young people.