In his RA address, Mario Cilento, president of the New York State AFL-CIO said that it was his 12th grade English teacher at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx who taught him his first lesson about labor.
He reminisced about a time when he clowned around in class, and how his teacher took him aside and told him was distracting his fellow students and sidetracking their learning.
“I take what I do now, and I recognize that there was a greater lesson in there from Mrs. McGough. Everything we do in this movement is about everybody trying to work off the same page and work out of the same playbook,” Cilento said. “When we do that as a labor union, that’s when we reach our potential.”