Two months ago, America's leading union federation, the AFL-CIO, met in Pittsburgh and elevated longtime Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka to its presidency, replacing the cautious 75-year-old John Sweeney and providing hope that organized labor will finally get the breath of fresh air it has needed for years.

To reverse labor's slow descent into irrelevance will require a bold shift by Mr. Trumka back to trade unionism's first principles, including advocacy of "bread and butter" improvements in pay and working conditions and support for workers abroad.

Once before in its long history, American labor found itself socially isolated, facing intransigent employers, feckless politicians and a challenging combination of rapid technological change and a multi-ethnic immigrant workforce. Then, as now, trade unions were viewed as special interest groups interfering with market efficiency. Instead of a seat at the table of power, many workers lived off the crumbs that fell to the floor.

To cope with these forces in the late 19th century, Samuel Gompers, the AFL's socialist founder, combined a promise of better pay, shorter hours and safer working conditions with organizational innovation to find common ground among millions of workers in a wide range of trades, industries and professions.

While the AFL structure granted autonomy to its sometimes racially segregated craft unions, it also chartered "federal locals" to organize thousands of immigrant and minority workers which, in turn, became the foundation of the great industrial unions of the 1930s.

Mr. Gompers combined his domestic agenda with the creation in 1919 of the International Labor Organization to block a race to the bottom in labor standards during the first wave of what we now call "globalization."

Mr. Trumka needs to rally today's diverse workforce around a similar bread-and-butter stand against the declining pay, working conditions and overall social security that workers in America's factories, farms and offices are now experiencing.

At the same time, he must rally support in America for democratic rights and better pay and working conditions for the billion or so workers who now have joined America in the global economy -- in countries such as China, Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam. Indeed, if trade unions cannot stand together across national borders for their common goals, workers will remain set against each other in a senseless downward spiral that only weakens a deeply troubled global economy.

Domestically, such an effort could turn unorganized workers toward union halls instead of town halls. Internationally, Mr. Trumka could offer workers in the global south the hope that if they stay home and organize they can prosper and be free; this would make them less likely to desperately travel north in today's equivalent of the underground railroad.

Mr. Trumka has many qualities that work in his favor. He can be a commanding speaker and has been an impressive advocate for labor's cause over several decades. Twenty-five years ago, after seven years in the same dangerous Pennsylvania coal mines that his father, father-in-law and grandfather worked, he took over the miners' union in the wake of a rank-and-file revolt against the union's corrupt and violent leaders. He then used creative forms of civil disobedience to win a bitter strike against the Pittston Coal Co.

As secretary-treasurer, Mr. Trumka led one of the AFL-CIO's most successful new programs, its capital markets strategy, which leverages workers' pension fund assets to lobby for sorely needed improvements in corporate governance and social responsibility.

But can Mr. Trumka translate these experiences into a viable program that pumps life into the AFL-CIO and the rest of the labor movement?

Unfortunately, Mr. Trumka's subdued acceptance speech in Pittsburgh offered little sign of his larger plans. Instead, he backtracked on health care -- slipping away from the AFL-CIO's commitment to a "single-payer" system -- and persisted in his call for "card check" as a substitute for traditional union elections by secret ballot. The card-check proposal includes important reforms, but it's seen by many as undemocratic, which provides a propaganda tool to anti-union politicians.

Mr. Gompers, whose pragmatic but progressive approach made labor a mass movement with independent power for the first time in American history, offers a compelling alternative.

When asked what labor wanted, Mr. Gompers famously quipped "More" -- that is, more schools, fewer prisons; more books, fewer arsenals; more learning, less vice; more leisure, less greed; more justice, less revenge.

Not a bad place for President Trumka to start labor's revival.

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