Former AFL-CIO President John Sweeney dies at age 86

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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, AFL-CIO national media manager Carolyn Bobb said. The cause of his death wasn't immediately disclosed.

Sweeney was credited with transforming the nation’s largest labor 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 labor 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 labor 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 labor 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...