Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Steven Tolman Denounces The Death Of George Floyd
June 4, 2020
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Steven Tolman Denounces The Death Of George Floyd
The Massachusetts AFL-CIO stands in solidarity with the black community and condemns the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others. Far too often, Black People are disproportionately victims of police brutality and other forms of systemic racism. To achieve economic justice, we must stand together and actively fight for racial justice in our workplaces, our homes, and our collective communities. We know that good policing and racial justice aren’t mutually exclusive and both are crucial to creating a just and fair society that benefits working people. We must have the conversations with each other needed to forge a common understanding of the history, meaning, and impact of structural racism in our country, and to come up with new ways that we as an organization and as a movement can strive to put an end to it. The Massachusetts AFL-CIO is committed to continuing the work of creating lasting systemic change to fight racism in all of its forms.
-Steven Tolman, President, Massachusetts AFL-CIO
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The role of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO is to serve as the unified voice of over 800 local unions and 400,000 organized workers in the Commonwealth, and to be a voice for all working people, those in unions and those not yet organized. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families—by working for economic, social and racial justice in the workplace, in our communities, our state and in our nation. Our vision is of a fair and just society that benefits all working people, not a system that’s rigged in favor of the wealthy few. Formed in 1887 as the Massachusetts branch of the American Federation of Labor, and later chartered by the national AFL-CIO in 1958, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO is a union of unions, dedicated to achieving a better quality of life for working families in our commonwealth.