Odds are that come September, Rich Trumka will be the new president of the AFL-CIO.

In past battles over health care reform, Trumka was on the side of the labor grassroots and supported a single payer national health care system.

Where will he be now?

“Historically he’s been a real strong advocate of single payer,” said Mark Dudzic, of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer. “The labor movement also spit in the 90s on whether or not to support the Clinton health care plan versus single payer. And Rich was on the side of the single payer folks in that fight. We hope he’ll be with us on this.”

Dudzic was arrested last month for demanding that the Senate Finance Committee put single payer on the table.

“The closer you get to the grassroots of the labor movement the more unified people are,” Dudzic said. “The folks who are out in the field in the fight everyday are really very supportive of single payer. That’s what the purpose of the Labor Campaign is — to mobilize that grassroots support. Once you get inside the beltway and you get these connections with the Democratic Party then some of the national leaders don’t want to offend politicians. That’s where you get complicated and run into difficulties.”

Dudzic said there is “a massive effort underway right now to go to the AFL-CIO convention in mid September and pass a resolution that puts the federation on record as supporting single payer health care and not supporting compromises that would just bail out the private insurance industry.”

Dudzic said that President Obama is being “way too cautious” in the health care fight.

“He’s fighting the last war and not the next war,” Dudzic said. “He needs to seize the historic opportunity that the crisis about health care delivery and the economic crisis has provided to make a substantial change that he knows in his heart and his soul is the right thing to do.”