Communist
13th January 2010, 05:39
-------------------
Trumka: The Labor Movement's Vision for Our Nation (http://afl-cio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/sp01112010.cfm)
Remarks (http://npc.press.org/video/player.cfm?type=lunch&id=19307) by Richard L. Trumka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trumka), President (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/leaders/officers_trumka.cfm) of the AFL-CIO (http://afl-cio.org/),
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.
January 11, 2010
-----------------
Good morning and thank you, Donna (Lienwand (http://content.usatoday.com/community/tags/reporter.aspx?id=175)). I am
delighted to be here at the National Press Club (http://npc.press.org/). I want
to thank the officers of the Press Club for the
invitation to be with you today, especially President
Lienwand (http://www.press.org/about/president/bio.cfm) and speakers' committee member Bob Carden.
Ten days into the new decade, and one year into the
Obama Administration, our nation remains poised between
the failed policies of the past and our hopes for a
better future. This is a moment that cries out for
political courage - but it is not much in evidence.
I spent the first week of this year traveling on the
west coast. In San Francisco, I was arrested (http://www.revleft.com/vb/strikes-boycotts-arrests-t126321/index.html) with low-
wage hotel workers fighting to protect their health care
and pensions from leveraged buyouts gone bad. In Los
Angeles and San Diego, I talked with working Americans
moved to tears by foreclosure and unemployment,
outsourcing and benefit cuts.
Everywhere I went, people asked me, why do so many of
the people we elect seem to care only about Wall Street?
Why is helping banks a matter of urgency, but
unemployment is something we just have to live with?
Why don't we make anything in America anymore? And why
is it so hard to pass a health care bill that guarantees
Americans healthy lives instead of guaranteeing
insurance companies healthy profits?
As I travelled from city to city, I heard a new sense of
resignation from middle class Americans, people laid off
for the first time in their lives asking, "What did I do
wrong?"
I came away shaken by the sense that the very things
that make America great are in danger. What makes us
unique among nations is this: In America, working
people are the middle class. We built our middle class
in the 20th century through hard work, struggle and
visionary political leadershi (http://www.workersworld.net/)p. But a generation of
destructive, greed-driven economic policies has eroded
that progress and now threatens our very identity as a
nation.
Today, on every coast and in between, working women and
men are fighting to join the middle class and to protect
and rebuild it. We crave political leadership ready to
fight for the kind of America we want to leave to our
children and against the forces of greed that brought us
to this moment. But instead we hear a resurgence of
complacency and political paralysis. Too many people in
Washington seem to think that now that we have bailed
out the banks, everything will be okay.
In 2010, our elected leaders must choose between
continuing the policies of the past or striking out on a
new economic course for America-a course that will
reverse the damaging trend toward greater inequality
that is crippling our nation.
At this moment, the voices of America's working women
and men must be heard in Washington-not the voices of
bankers and speculators for whom it always seems to be
the best of times, but the voices of those for whom the
New Year brings pink slips and givebacks, hollowed-out
health care, foreclosures and pension freezes- the roll
call of an economy that long ago stopped working for
most of us.
Today I want to talk to you about the labor movement's
vision for our nation.
Working people want an American economy that works for
them-that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly
shared, and where the economic life of our nation is
about solving problems like the threat of climate change
rather than creating problems like the foreclosure
crisis. We know that growing inequality undermines our
ability to grow as a nation - by squandering the talents
and the contributions of our people and consigning
entire communities to stagnation and failure.
If we are going to make our vision real, we must
challenge our political leaders, and we must also
challenge ourselves and our movement.
Workers formed the labor movement as an expression of
our lives- a chain of responsibility and solidarity,
making millions of people here in America and around the
world into agents of social change - able to accomplish
much more together than as isolated individuals. That
movement gives voice to the hopes, values and interests
of working people every day. But despite our best
efforts, we have endured a generation of stagnant wages
and collapsing benefits-a generation where the labor
movement has been much more about defense than about
offense, where our horizons are shrinking rather than
growing.
But the future of the labor movement depends on moving
forward-on innovating and changing the way we work, on
being open to all working people and giving voice to all
workers, even when our laws and employers seek to divide
us from each other. And that is something we are
working on every day.
The AFL-CIO is building new ways for working people to
organize themselves, and new models for collective
bargaining. We have created Working America, a 3
million member community-based union growing in working
class neighborhoods-that is one of the signal
accomplishments of my predecessor John Sweeney, who I'm
so happy is here today.
We are very proud of our alliance with the workers'
center movement that links the unions of the AFL-CIO
with hundreds of grassroots organizations. We are also
working with community allies to strengthen the voice
and bargaining power of low-wage workers in Los Angeles'
car washes - some of the worst-paid and worst-treated
workers in this country.
Next week, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt
Baker (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/leaders/officers_baker.cfm) will lead the labor movement's commemoration of
the 50th anniversary of the lunch counter sit-ins (http://www.watson.org/%7Elisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/sit-ins.html) in
Greensboro (http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/factsheet.cfm?key=30&newskey=53), North Carolina - continuing the great work
she has done over so many years on behalf of the most
vulnerable in our society. Not far from Greensboro, we
have been working with unemployed African American day
laborers and their workers' center, desperately trying
to keep alive the dream launched in those sit-ins.
In San Diego last week, I visited a pre-apprenticeship
program formed by the local labor movement to create
career paths for at-risk youth. In Los Angeles, I saw a
remarkable community-based labor-management training
program created by the Electrical Workers (http://ibew11.org/) that is
focused on green jobs. These programs demonstrate the
tremendous benefits that are possible when labor and
business come together to solve problems jointly.
I met people who had been homeless who were about to
become journeymen electricians. A young man named
Nakayah said to me, "The union gave me a chance to go
from no life to the hope for a middle-class life. It
didn't just teach me to get a job, it taught me how to
be a man."
As I talked to hotel workers-members of Unite Here, many
of them immigrants-on strike to keep hotel jobs from
falling back into poverty and to union members with
PhD's fighting to prevent California's budget
catastrophe from cratering not only their jobs but the
education of their state's children, I thought of my
father on strike in the coal fields when I was a boy.
And I was reminded of this basic truth: A job is a good
job because workers fight to make it one-it doesn't
matter if the job is in a coal mine or a classroom or a
car wash. And that is why unions are needed today, more
than ever.
I grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania, and I
was surrounded by the legacy of my parents and
grandparents. My grandfather and my father and their
fellow workers went into mines that were death traps, to
work for wages that weren't enough to buy food and
clothes for their families. They and the union they
built made those jobs into middle class jobs. When I
went into the mine, it was a good job. A good job meant
possibilities for me-possibilities that my mother moved
heaven and earth to make real-that took me to Penn State
and to law school and to this podium.
What is our legacy-the legacy of those of us who are
shaping the world our children and grandchildren will
inhabit? Is our government laying the foundations young
people need? Do workplaces offer hope? Do they even
offer work? Are we building a world we will be proud to
hand over to our children? Are the voices of the young,
of the future, being heard?
In September, I was elected President of the AFL-CIO
together with Secretary Treasurer Liz Shuler (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/leaders/officers_shuler.cfm) and
Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1unfge01NU&feature=related), both of whom
are here today. Liz (http://blog.aflcio.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/es_2_bt.jpg) Shuler (http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/resources/images/shuler_l2.jpg) is the youngest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Shuler) principal
officer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOfRLvcO5VI)of the AFL-CIO in our history, and I asked her
(http://blog.aflcio.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/es_2_bt.jpg) to lead a program of outreach to young workers (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liz-shuler/young-workers-hit-hard-hi_b_382628.html). (http://wwppitt.weebly.com/) As part
of that effort, the AFL-CIO conducted a study of young
adults between the ages of 18 and 34, comparing their
economic standing, attitudes and hopes with those from a
similar survey conducted 10 years ago. The findings are
shocking. They reveal a lost decade for young workers
in America. Lower wages. Education deferred. Things
are so bad that one in three of these 18-34-year-olds is
currently living at home with their parents.
The desperation I heard in this survey and in the voices
of proud, hard-working Americans fills me with an
enormous sense of urgency, an urgency that should be
shared by every elected official here in Washington and
across this country.
As a country and a movement, our challenge is to build a
new economy that can restore working people's
expectations and hope. If you were laid off because of
what Wall Street did to our economy, it's not your
fault. A dead end job with no benefits is not the best
our country can do for its citizens.
What went wrong with our economy? You could say it is
as simple as we built a low-wage, high consumption
economy and tried to bridge the contradiction with debt.
And there's a lot of truth in that simplicity. But if
we are going to understand what is wrong in a way that
will help us understand how to fix it, we need a little
more detail.
A generation ago, our nation's policymakers embarked on
a campaign of radical deregulation and corporate
empowerment - one that celebrated private greed over
public service.
The AFL-CIO warned of the dangers of that path -- trade
policies that rewarded and accelerated outsourcing,
financial deregulation designed to promote speculation
and the dismantling of our pension and health care
systems. We warned that the middle class could not
survive in such an economy, that growing inequality
would inevitably shrink the American pie, that we were
borrowing from the rest of the world at an unsustainable
pace, that busts would follow bubbles and that our
country would be worse off in the end.
These policies culminated in the worst economic decade
in living memory-we suffered a net loss of jobs, the
housing market collapsed, real wages fell and more
children fell into poverty. And the enormous growth in
inequality during that decade yielded mediocre growth
overall. This is not a portrait of a cyclical
recession, but of a nation with profound, unaddressed
structural economic problems on a long-term, downward
slide.
Our structural problems pre-date the crisis that hit in
2007 and they are not going to go away by themselves in
2010.
First, we have underinvested in the foundations of our
economy-including the transportation and communications
infrastructure that are essential to a middle-class
society and a dynamic, competitive high-wage economy.
But the most important foundation of our economy is
education and training. We simply cannot continue to
skimp on the quality of education we provide to all of
our children and expect to lead in the global economy.
Likewise, we need to provide opportunities for lifelong
skills upgrading to workers - through both private and
public sector initiatives.
Second, we have failed over a long period of time to
create enough good jobs at home to maintain our middle
class - and we have allowed corporate hacks to whittle
away at workers' bargaining power to undermine the
quality of the remaining jobs.
Finally, the structural absence of good jobs means a
shortage of sustainable demand to drive our economy.
We want an entirely different kind of economy. Let's
talk about what we need to do.
We must directly and immediately take on what is wrong-
by creating millions of good jobs now, rebuilding our
economic foundations and giving working people the
freedom to form a union again and make all our jobs good
jobs.
We must pass genuine health care reform and reregulate
our financial system-so that finance is the servant of
the real economy, and not its master; so that we have an
independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:sxcVGtyndkYJ:www.financialstability.gov/docs/CFPA-Act.pdf+Consumer+Financial+Protection+Agency&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShuyKfVwSWjmC7a8CPEN1ZbrObZNwFBKTw5k6_p SNcTylDlvOab9PdUH5OeHyaA_nKSCa-hk9rfFrkNtP6jQDwIjSnuAj1k1Mg3dTTlEuf4qRKF2I_VwcUjh jnziPGTolMlOJmu&sig=AHIEtbR3N-la1E4omAeH3lbY0DInfch54Q); and so
that we never again take the public's money and use it
to rescue bank executives and stockholders. I'd like to
commend President Obama's leadership in insisting on a
viable, strong and independent consumer protection
agency - which is crucial to real financial reform.
The AFL-CIO's five-point program (http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/11/17/trumka-jobs-crisisfix-it-now/) will create more than 4
million jobs-extending unemployment benefits, including
COBRA (http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/health-plans/cobra.htm); expanding federal infrastructure and green jobs
investments; dramatically increasing federal aid to
state and local governments facing fiscal disaster;
direct job creation where feasible; and finally, direct
lending of TARP (http://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/tarpinfo.htm) money to small and medium sized
businesses that can't get credit because of the
financial crisis.
And we need to adopt a tax on financial speculation so
that we can fund the jobs effort as the economy
recovers.
Some in Washington say when it comes to jobs: Go slow-
take half steps. These voices are harming millions of
unemployed Americans and their families -- but they are
also jeopardizing our economic recovery. It is
responsible to have a plan for paying for job creation
over time. But it is bad economics and suicidal
politics not to aggressively address the job crisis at a
time of double (http://useconomy.about.com/od/economicindicators/a/unemploy-curren.htm)- (http://forecasts.org/unemploy.htm)digit (http://www.nidataplus.com/lfeus1.htm) unemployment (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm). In fact, budget
deficits over the medium and long term will be worse if
we allow the economy to slide into long job stagnation
-- unemployed workers don't pay taxes and they don't go
shopping; businesses without customers don't hire
workers, they don't invest and they also don't pay
taxes.
Our economy does not work without good jobs, so we must
take action now to restore workers' voices in America.
The systematic silencing of American workers by denying
our right to form unions is at the heart of the
disappearance of good jobs in America. We must pass (http://freechoiceact.org/petition/) the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Free_Choice_Act)
Employee Free Choice Act (http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca/) so that workers can have the
chance to turn bad jobs into good jobs, and so we can
reduce the inequality which is undermining our prospects
for stable economic growth. And we must do it now-not
next year, not even this summer. Now.
Each of these initiatives should be rooted in a crucial
alliance of the middle class and the poor. But today,
as I speak to you, something different is happening with
health care.
On the one hand we have the House bill, which asks the
small part of our country that has prospered in the last
decade-the richest of the rich-to pay a little bit more
in taxes so that most Americans can have health
insurance. And the House bill reins in the power of
health insurers and employers by having an employer
mandate and a strong public option.
But thanks to the Senate rules, the appalling
irresponsibility of the Senate Republicans and the power
of the wealthy among some Democrats, the Senate bill
instead drives a wedge between the middle class and the
poor. The bill rightly seeks to ensure that most
Americans have health insurance. But instead of taxing
the rich, the Senate bill taxes the middle class by
taxing workers' health plans-not just union members'
health care; most of the 31 million insured employees
who would be hit by the excise tax are not union
members.
The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working
Americans who need health care for their families
against working Americans struggling to keep health care
for their families. This is a policy designed to
benefit elites-in this case, insurers, hospitals,
pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at
the expense of the broader public. It's the same tragic
pattern that got us where we are today, and I can assure
you the labor movement is fighting with everything we've
got to win health care reform that is worthy of the
support of working men and women.
These great struggles over health care, good jobs, the
freedom to organize and financial reform are just the
first steps.
Beyond the short-term jobs crisis, we must have an
agenda for restoring American manufacturing-a
combination of fair trade and currency policies, worker
training, infrastructure investment and regional
development policies targeted to help economically
distressed areas. We cannot be a prosperous middle
class society in a dynamic global economy without a
healthy manufacturing sector.
We must have an agenda to address the daily challenges
workers face on the job - to ensure safe and healthy
workplaces and family-friendly work rules.
We also need comprehensive reform of our immigration
policy -- based on shared prosperity and fairness, not
cheap labor.
And we must take on the retirement crisis. Too many
employers have replaced the system of pensions we used
to have with underfunded savings accounts fully exposed
to everything that is wrong with Wall Street. Today,
the median balance in 401K accounts is only $27,000 -
nowhere near enough to fund a secure retirement. We
need to return to a policy of employers sharing
responsibility for retirement security with employees,
while also bolstering and strengthening Social Security.
President Obama campaigned on a platform of boldly
taking on these challenges. He has spoken often about
the need to refound our economy on doing real things,
rather than dreaming of financial pots of gold. He has
asked Vice President Biden to lead the effort to restore
the middle class. For the first time I can recall, we
have an Administration that sees manufacturing - making
things here -- as central to America's future and that
speaks clearly about the positive role for workers and
their unions in that future. President Obama has laid
out an aggressive agenda for structural change and has
appointed people like Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis who
believe in that vision.
Of course, President Obama inherited a terrible mess
from his predecessor-a journey of stolen elections,
ruinous tax cuts for the rich, dishonest wars, financial
scandal, government-sponsored torture, flooded cities
and finally, economic collapse.
President Obama's administration began - out of
necessity and vision -- with an act of political
courage-the enactment of a broad and substantial
economic recovery program. Despite Republican
opposition, the stimulus was big enough to make a real,
positive impact on our economy, saving or creating more
than a million jobs already.
But the jobs crisis has escalated, the foreclosure
crisis continues and Wall Street appears to have
returned to its old ways. This is Bonus Week on Wall
Street - watch and see how much discipline they show,
with the nation watching.
Now more than ever, we need the boldness and the clarity
we saw in our president during the campaign in 2008,
when he outlined the scope of the economic problems
facing our nation -- unencumbered by the political
cross-currents weighing us down today. One year into
the Obama Administration and one year into a Congress
with strong Democratic majorities, we need leadership
action that matches the urgency that is felt so deeply
by working people.
Too often Washington falls into the grip of ambivalence
about the fundamental purpose of government. Is it to
protect wealthy elites and gently encourage them to be
more charitable? Or is it to look after the vast
majority of the American people?
Government in the interests of the majority of Americans
has produced our greatest achievements. The New Deal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal).
The Great Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society) and the Civil Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement) movement (http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9.html) --
Social Security (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_%28United_States%29), Medicare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_%28United_States%29), the minimum wage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage) and the
forty-hour work week (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode05/usc_sec_05_00006101----000-.html), the Civil Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964) Act (http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/civil-rights-act/) and the
Voting Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act) Act (http://www.justice.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro_b.php). This is what made the United States
a beacon of hope in a confused and divided world.
But too many people now take for granted government's
role as protector of Wall Street and the privileged.
They see middle-class Americans as overpaid and
underworked. They see Social Security as a problem
rather than the only piece of our retirement system that
actually works. They feel sorry for homeless people,
but fail to see the connections between downsizing,
outsourcing, inequality and homelessness.
This world view has brought Democrats nothing but
disaster. The Republican response is to offer the
middle class the false hope of tax cuts. Tax cuts end
up enriching the rich and devastating the middle class
by destroying the institutions like public education and
Social Security that make the middle class possible.
But no matter what I say or do, the reality is that when
unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people
will not stand for tokenism. We will not vote for
politicians who think they can push a few crumbs our way
and then continue the failed economic policies of the
last 30 years.
Let me be even blunter. In 1992, workers voted for
Democrats who promised action on jobs, who talked about
reining in corporate greed and who promised health care
reform. Instead, we got N (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement)A (http://www.naftanow.org/)F (http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/en/view.aspx)T (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/89)A (http://www.ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/north-american-free-trade-agreement-nafta), an emboldened Wall
Street - and not much more. We swallowed our
disappointment and worked to preserve a Democratic
majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative
was. But there was no way to persuade enough working
Americans to go to the polls when they couldn't tell the
difference between the two parties. Politicians who
think that working people have it too good - too much
health care, too much Social Security and Medicare, too
much power on the job - are inviting a repeat of 1994.
Our country cannot afford such a repeat.
President Obama said in his inaugural address, "The
state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift,
and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to
lay a new foundation for growth." Now is the time to
make good on these words - for Congress (http://www.congress.org/), for President
Obama and for the American people.
These are big challenges. But it is long past time to
take them on. And for those members of Congress who
think maybe taking on big challenges is not their job,
and who want to keep offering working people tokenism
while they govern in the interests of the people who
trashed our economy, I have a suggestion for how to
spend your weekends.
Go sit with the unemployed. Talk to college students
looking at tuition hikes, laid-off professors, and no
jobs at graduation. Talk to workers whose jobs are
being offshored. Ask what these Americans think about
their future. Ask them what they think of Wall Street,
of health insurance companies, of big banks. Ask them
if they want a government that is in partnership with
those folks, or a government that stands up for working
people.
Then think about the great promise of America and the
great legacy we have inherited. Our wealth as a nation
and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of
my predecessor (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/history/history/gompers.cfm) Samuel Gompers (http://www.history.umd.edu/Gompers/index.htm), "more schoolhouses and
less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning
and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice
and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to
cultivate our better natures."
This is the American future the labor movement is
working for. Our political leaders have a choice. They
can work with us for a future where the middle class is
secure and growing, where inequality is on the decline
and where jobs provide ladders out of poverty. Or they
can work for a future where the profits of insurance
companies, speculators and outsourcers are secure.
There is no middle ground. Working America is waiting
for an answer. We are in a "show me" kind of mood, and
time is running out.
_____________________________________________
Portside aims to provide material of interest
to people on the left that will help them to
interpret the world and to change it.
Trumka: The Labor Movement's Vision for Our Nation (http://afl-cio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/sp01112010.cfm)
Remarks (http://npc.press.org/video/player.cfm?type=lunch&id=19307) by Richard L. Trumka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trumka), President (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/leaders/officers_trumka.cfm) of the AFL-CIO (http://afl-cio.org/),
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.
January 11, 2010
-----------------
Good morning and thank you, Donna (Lienwand (http://content.usatoday.com/community/tags/reporter.aspx?id=175)). I am
delighted to be here at the National Press Club (http://npc.press.org/). I want
to thank the officers of the Press Club for the
invitation to be with you today, especially President
Lienwand (http://www.press.org/about/president/bio.cfm) and speakers' committee member Bob Carden.
Ten days into the new decade, and one year into the
Obama Administration, our nation remains poised between
the failed policies of the past and our hopes for a
better future. This is a moment that cries out for
political courage - but it is not much in evidence.
I spent the first week of this year traveling on the
west coast. In San Francisco, I was arrested (http://www.revleft.com/vb/strikes-boycotts-arrests-t126321/index.html) with low-
wage hotel workers fighting to protect their health care
and pensions from leveraged buyouts gone bad. In Los
Angeles and San Diego, I talked with working Americans
moved to tears by foreclosure and unemployment,
outsourcing and benefit cuts.
Everywhere I went, people asked me, why do so many of
the people we elect seem to care only about Wall Street?
Why is helping banks a matter of urgency, but
unemployment is something we just have to live with?
Why don't we make anything in America anymore? And why
is it so hard to pass a health care bill that guarantees
Americans healthy lives instead of guaranteeing
insurance companies healthy profits?
As I travelled from city to city, I heard a new sense of
resignation from middle class Americans, people laid off
for the first time in their lives asking, "What did I do
wrong?"
I came away shaken by the sense that the very things
that make America great are in danger. What makes us
unique among nations is this: In America, working
people are the middle class. We built our middle class
in the 20th century through hard work, struggle and
visionary political leadershi (http://www.workersworld.net/)p. But a generation of
destructive, greed-driven economic policies has eroded
that progress and now threatens our very identity as a
nation.
Today, on every coast and in between, working women and
men are fighting to join the middle class and to protect
and rebuild it. We crave political leadership ready to
fight for the kind of America we want to leave to our
children and against the forces of greed that brought us
to this moment. But instead we hear a resurgence of
complacency and political paralysis. Too many people in
Washington seem to think that now that we have bailed
out the banks, everything will be okay.
In 2010, our elected leaders must choose between
continuing the policies of the past or striking out on a
new economic course for America-a course that will
reverse the damaging trend toward greater inequality
that is crippling our nation.
At this moment, the voices of America's working women
and men must be heard in Washington-not the voices of
bankers and speculators for whom it always seems to be
the best of times, but the voices of those for whom the
New Year brings pink slips and givebacks, hollowed-out
health care, foreclosures and pension freezes- the roll
call of an economy that long ago stopped working for
most of us.
Today I want to talk to you about the labor movement's
vision for our nation.
Working people want an American economy that works for
them-that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly
shared, and where the economic life of our nation is
about solving problems like the threat of climate change
rather than creating problems like the foreclosure
crisis. We know that growing inequality undermines our
ability to grow as a nation - by squandering the talents
and the contributions of our people and consigning
entire communities to stagnation and failure.
If we are going to make our vision real, we must
challenge our political leaders, and we must also
challenge ourselves and our movement.
Workers formed the labor movement as an expression of
our lives- a chain of responsibility and solidarity,
making millions of people here in America and around the
world into agents of social change - able to accomplish
much more together than as isolated individuals. That
movement gives voice to the hopes, values and interests
of working people every day. But despite our best
efforts, we have endured a generation of stagnant wages
and collapsing benefits-a generation where the labor
movement has been much more about defense than about
offense, where our horizons are shrinking rather than
growing.
But the future of the labor movement depends on moving
forward-on innovating and changing the way we work, on
being open to all working people and giving voice to all
workers, even when our laws and employers seek to divide
us from each other. And that is something we are
working on every day.
The AFL-CIO is building new ways for working people to
organize themselves, and new models for collective
bargaining. We have created Working America, a 3
million member community-based union growing in working
class neighborhoods-that is one of the signal
accomplishments of my predecessor John Sweeney, who I'm
so happy is here today.
We are very proud of our alliance with the workers'
center movement that links the unions of the AFL-CIO
with hundreds of grassroots organizations. We are also
working with community allies to strengthen the voice
and bargaining power of low-wage workers in Los Angeles'
car washes - some of the worst-paid and worst-treated
workers in this country.
Next week, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt
Baker (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/leaders/officers_baker.cfm) will lead the labor movement's commemoration of
the 50th anniversary of the lunch counter sit-ins (http://www.watson.org/%7Elisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/sit-ins.html) in
Greensboro (http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/factsheet.cfm?key=30&newskey=53), North Carolina - continuing the great work
she has done over so many years on behalf of the most
vulnerable in our society. Not far from Greensboro, we
have been working with unemployed African American day
laborers and their workers' center, desperately trying
to keep alive the dream launched in those sit-ins.
In San Diego last week, I visited a pre-apprenticeship
program formed by the local labor movement to create
career paths for at-risk youth. In Los Angeles, I saw a
remarkable community-based labor-management training
program created by the Electrical Workers (http://ibew11.org/) that is
focused on green jobs. These programs demonstrate the
tremendous benefits that are possible when labor and
business come together to solve problems jointly.
I met people who had been homeless who were about to
become journeymen electricians. A young man named
Nakayah said to me, "The union gave me a chance to go
from no life to the hope for a middle-class life. It
didn't just teach me to get a job, it taught me how to
be a man."
As I talked to hotel workers-members of Unite Here, many
of them immigrants-on strike to keep hotel jobs from
falling back into poverty and to union members with
PhD's fighting to prevent California's budget
catastrophe from cratering not only their jobs but the
education of their state's children, I thought of my
father on strike in the coal fields when I was a boy.
And I was reminded of this basic truth: A job is a good
job because workers fight to make it one-it doesn't
matter if the job is in a coal mine or a classroom or a
car wash. And that is why unions are needed today, more
than ever.
I grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania, and I
was surrounded by the legacy of my parents and
grandparents. My grandfather and my father and their
fellow workers went into mines that were death traps, to
work for wages that weren't enough to buy food and
clothes for their families. They and the union they
built made those jobs into middle class jobs. When I
went into the mine, it was a good job. A good job meant
possibilities for me-possibilities that my mother moved
heaven and earth to make real-that took me to Penn State
and to law school and to this podium.
What is our legacy-the legacy of those of us who are
shaping the world our children and grandchildren will
inhabit? Is our government laying the foundations young
people need? Do workplaces offer hope? Do they even
offer work? Are we building a world we will be proud to
hand over to our children? Are the voices of the young,
of the future, being heard?
In September, I was elected President of the AFL-CIO
together with Secretary Treasurer Liz Shuler (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/leaders/officers_shuler.cfm) and
Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1unfge01NU&feature=related), both of whom
are here today. Liz (http://blog.aflcio.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/es_2_bt.jpg) Shuler (http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/resources/images/shuler_l2.jpg) is the youngest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Shuler) principal
officer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOfRLvcO5VI)of the AFL-CIO in our history, and I asked her
(http://blog.aflcio.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/es_2_bt.jpg) to lead a program of outreach to young workers (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/liz-shuler/young-workers-hit-hard-hi_b_382628.html). (http://wwppitt.weebly.com/) As part
of that effort, the AFL-CIO conducted a study of young
adults between the ages of 18 and 34, comparing their
economic standing, attitudes and hopes with those from a
similar survey conducted 10 years ago. The findings are
shocking. They reveal a lost decade for young workers
in America. Lower wages. Education deferred. Things
are so bad that one in three of these 18-34-year-olds is
currently living at home with their parents.
The desperation I heard in this survey and in the voices
of proud, hard-working Americans fills me with an
enormous sense of urgency, an urgency that should be
shared by every elected official here in Washington and
across this country.
As a country and a movement, our challenge is to build a
new economy that can restore working people's
expectations and hope. If you were laid off because of
what Wall Street did to our economy, it's not your
fault. A dead end job with no benefits is not the best
our country can do for its citizens.
What went wrong with our economy? You could say it is
as simple as we built a low-wage, high consumption
economy and tried to bridge the contradiction with debt.
And there's a lot of truth in that simplicity. But if
we are going to understand what is wrong in a way that
will help us understand how to fix it, we need a little
more detail.
A generation ago, our nation's policymakers embarked on
a campaign of radical deregulation and corporate
empowerment - one that celebrated private greed over
public service.
The AFL-CIO warned of the dangers of that path -- trade
policies that rewarded and accelerated outsourcing,
financial deregulation designed to promote speculation
and the dismantling of our pension and health care
systems. We warned that the middle class could not
survive in such an economy, that growing inequality
would inevitably shrink the American pie, that we were
borrowing from the rest of the world at an unsustainable
pace, that busts would follow bubbles and that our
country would be worse off in the end.
These policies culminated in the worst economic decade
in living memory-we suffered a net loss of jobs, the
housing market collapsed, real wages fell and more
children fell into poverty. And the enormous growth in
inequality during that decade yielded mediocre growth
overall. This is not a portrait of a cyclical
recession, but of a nation with profound, unaddressed
structural economic problems on a long-term, downward
slide.
Our structural problems pre-date the crisis that hit in
2007 and they are not going to go away by themselves in
2010.
First, we have underinvested in the foundations of our
economy-including the transportation and communications
infrastructure that are essential to a middle-class
society and a dynamic, competitive high-wage economy.
But the most important foundation of our economy is
education and training. We simply cannot continue to
skimp on the quality of education we provide to all of
our children and expect to lead in the global economy.
Likewise, we need to provide opportunities for lifelong
skills upgrading to workers - through both private and
public sector initiatives.
Second, we have failed over a long period of time to
create enough good jobs at home to maintain our middle
class - and we have allowed corporate hacks to whittle
away at workers' bargaining power to undermine the
quality of the remaining jobs.
Finally, the structural absence of good jobs means a
shortage of sustainable demand to drive our economy.
We want an entirely different kind of economy. Let's
talk about what we need to do.
We must directly and immediately take on what is wrong-
by creating millions of good jobs now, rebuilding our
economic foundations and giving working people the
freedom to form a union again and make all our jobs good
jobs.
We must pass genuine health care reform and reregulate
our financial system-so that finance is the servant of
the real economy, and not its master; so that we have an
independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:sxcVGtyndkYJ:www.financialstability.gov/docs/CFPA-Act.pdf+Consumer+Financial+Protection+Agency&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShuyKfVwSWjmC7a8CPEN1ZbrObZNwFBKTw5k6_p SNcTylDlvOab9PdUH5OeHyaA_nKSCa-hk9rfFrkNtP6jQDwIjSnuAj1k1Mg3dTTlEuf4qRKF2I_VwcUjh jnziPGTolMlOJmu&sig=AHIEtbR3N-la1E4omAeH3lbY0DInfch54Q); and so
that we never again take the public's money and use it
to rescue bank executives and stockholders. I'd like to
commend President Obama's leadership in insisting on a
viable, strong and independent consumer protection
agency - which is crucial to real financial reform.
The AFL-CIO's five-point program (http://blog.aflcio.org/2009/11/17/trumka-jobs-crisisfix-it-now/) will create more than 4
million jobs-extending unemployment benefits, including
COBRA (http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/health-plans/cobra.htm); expanding federal infrastructure and green jobs
investments; dramatically increasing federal aid to
state and local governments facing fiscal disaster;
direct job creation where feasible; and finally, direct
lending of TARP (http://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/tarpinfo.htm) money to small and medium sized
businesses that can't get credit because of the
financial crisis.
And we need to adopt a tax on financial speculation so
that we can fund the jobs effort as the economy
recovers.
Some in Washington say when it comes to jobs: Go slow-
take half steps. These voices are harming millions of
unemployed Americans and their families -- but they are
also jeopardizing our economic recovery. It is
responsible to have a plan for paying for job creation
over time. But it is bad economics and suicidal
politics not to aggressively address the job crisis at a
time of double (http://useconomy.about.com/od/economicindicators/a/unemploy-curren.htm)- (http://forecasts.org/unemploy.htm)digit (http://www.nidataplus.com/lfeus1.htm) unemployment (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm). In fact, budget
deficits over the medium and long term will be worse if
we allow the economy to slide into long job stagnation
-- unemployed workers don't pay taxes and they don't go
shopping; businesses without customers don't hire
workers, they don't invest and they also don't pay
taxes.
Our economy does not work without good jobs, so we must
take action now to restore workers' voices in America.
The systematic silencing of American workers by denying
our right to form unions is at the heart of the
disappearance of good jobs in America. We must pass (http://freechoiceact.org/petition/) the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Free_Choice_Act)
Employee Free Choice Act (http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca/) so that workers can have the
chance to turn bad jobs into good jobs, and so we can
reduce the inequality which is undermining our prospects
for stable economic growth. And we must do it now-not
next year, not even this summer. Now.
Each of these initiatives should be rooted in a crucial
alliance of the middle class and the poor. But today,
as I speak to you, something different is happening with
health care.
On the one hand we have the House bill, which asks the
small part of our country that has prospered in the last
decade-the richest of the rich-to pay a little bit more
in taxes so that most Americans can have health
insurance. And the House bill reins in the power of
health insurers and employers by having an employer
mandate and a strong public option.
But thanks to the Senate rules, the appalling
irresponsibility of the Senate Republicans and the power
of the wealthy among some Democrats, the Senate bill
instead drives a wedge between the middle class and the
poor. The bill rightly seeks to ensure that most
Americans have health insurance. But instead of taxing
the rich, the Senate bill taxes the middle class by
taxing workers' health plans-not just union members'
health care; most of the 31 million insured employees
who would be hit by the excise tax are not union
members.
The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working
Americans who need health care for their families
against working Americans struggling to keep health care
for their families. This is a policy designed to
benefit elites-in this case, insurers, hospitals,
pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at
the expense of the broader public. It's the same tragic
pattern that got us where we are today, and I can assure
you the labor movement is fighting with everything we've
got to win health care reform that is worthy of the
support of working men and women.
These great struggles over health care, good jobs, the
freedom to organize and financial reform are just the
first steps.
Beyond the short-term jobs crisis, we must have an
agenda for restoring American manufacturing-a
combination of fair trade and currency policies, worker
training, infrastructure investment and regional
development policies targeted to help economically
distressed areas. We cannot be a prosperous middle
class society in a dynamic global economy without a
healthy manufacturing sector.
We must have an agenda to address the daily challenges
workers face on the job - to ensure safe and healthy
workplaces and family-friendly work rules.
We also need comprehensive reform of our immigration
policy -- based on shared prosperity and fairness, not
cheap labor.
And we must take on the retirement crisis. Too many
employers have replaced the system of pensions we used
to have with underfunded savings accounts fully exposed
to everything that is wrong with Wall Street. Today,
the median balance in 401K accounts is only $27,000 -
nowhere near enough to fund a secure retirement. We
need to return to a policy of employers sharing
responsibility for retirement security with employees,
while also bolstering and strengthening Social Security.
President Obama campaigned on a platform of boldly
taking on these challenges. He has spoken often about
the need to refound our economy on doing real things,
rather than dreaming of financial pots of gold. He has
asked Vice President Biden to lead the effort to restore
the middle class. For the first time I can recall, we
have an Administration that sees manufacturing - making
things here -- as central to America's future and that
speaks clearly about the positive role for workers and
their unions in that future. President Obama has laid
out an aggressive agenda for structural change and has
appointed people like Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis who
believe in that vision.
Of course, President Obama inherited a terrible mess
from his predecessor-a journey of stolen elections,
ruinous tax cuts for the rich, dishonest wars, financial
scandal, government-sponsored torture, flooded cities
and finally, economic collapse.
President Obama's administration began - out of
necessity and vision -- with an act of political
courage-the enactment of a broad and substantial
economic recovery program. Despite Republican
opposition, the stimulus was big enough to make a real,
positive impact on our economy, saving or creating more
than a million jobs already.
But the jobs crisis has escalated, the foreclosure
crisis continues and Wall Street appears to have
returned to its old ways. This is Bonus Week on Wall
Street - watch and see how much discipline they show,
with the nation watching.
Now more than ever, we need the boldness and the clarity
we saw in our president during the campaign in 2008,
when he outlined the scope of the economic problems
facing our nation -- unencumbered by the political
cross-currents weighing us down today. One year into
the Obama Administration and one year into a Congress
with strong Democratic majorities, we need leadership
action that matches the urgency that is felt so deeply
by working people.
Too often Washington falls into the grip of ambivalence
about the fundamental purpose of government. Is it to
protect wealthy elites and gently encourage them to be
more charitable? Or is it to look after the vast
majority of the American people?
Government in the interests of the majority of Americans
has produced our greatest achievements. The New Deal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal).
The Great Society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society) and the Civil Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement) movement (http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9.html) --
Social Security (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_%28United_States%29), Medicare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_%28United_States%29), the minimum wage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage) and the
forty-hour work week (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode05/usc_sec_05_00006101----000-.html), the Civil Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964) Act (http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/civil-rights-act/) and the
Voting Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act) Act (http://www.justice.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro_b.php). This is what made the United States
a beacon of hope in a confused and divided world.
But too many people now take for granted government's
role as protector of Wall Street and the privileged.
They see middle-class Americans as overpaid and
underworked. They see Social Security as a problem
rather than the only piece of our retirement system that
actually works. They feel sorry for homeless people,
but fail to see the connections between downsizing,
outsourcing, inequality and homelessness.
This world view has brought Democrats nothing but
disaster. The Republican response is to offer the
middle class the false hope of tax cuts. Tax cuts end
up enriching the rich and devastating the middle class
by destroying the institutions like public education and
Social Security that make the middle class possible.
But no matter what I say or do, the reality is that when
unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people
will not stand for tokenism. We will not vote for
politicians who think they can push a few crumbs our way
and then continue the failed economic policies of the
last 30 years.
Let me be even blunter. In 1992, workers voted for
Democrats who promised action on jobs, who talked about
reining in corporate greed and who promised health care
reform. Instead, we got N (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement)A (http://www.naftanow.org/)F (http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/en/view.aspx)T (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/89)A (http://www.ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/north-american-free-trade-agreement-nafta), an emboldened Wall
Street - and not much more. We swallowed our
disappointment and worked to preserve a Democratic
majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative
was. But there was no way to persuade enough working
Americans to go to the polls when they couldn't tell the
difference between the two parties. Politicians who
think that working people have it too good - too much
health care, too much Social Security and Medicare, too
much power on the job - are inviting a repeat of 1994.
Our country cannot afford such a repeat.
President Obama said in his inaugural address, "The
state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift,
and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to
lay a new foundation for growth." Now is the time to
make good on these words - for Congress (http://www.congress.org/), for President
Obama and for the American people.
These are big challenges. But it is long past time to
take them on. And for those members of Congress who
think maybe taking on big challenges is not their job,
and who want to keep offering working people tokenism
while they govern in the interests of the people who
trashed our economy, I have a suggestion for how to
spend your weekends.
Go sit with the unemployed. Talk to college students
looking at tuition hikes, laid-off professors, and no
jobs at graduation. Talk to workers whose jobs are
being offshored. Ask what these Americans think about
their future. Ask them what they think of Wall Street,
of health insurance companies, of big banks. Ask them
if they want a government that is in partnership with
those folks, or a government that stands up for working
people.
Then think about the great promise of America and the
great legacy we have inherited. Our wealth as a nation
and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of
my predecessor (http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/history/history/gompers.cfm) Samuel Gompers (http://www.history.umd.edu/Gompers/index.htm), "more schoolhouses and
less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning
and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice
and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to
cultivate our better natures."
This is the American future the labor movement is
working for. Our political leaders have a choice. They
can work with us for a future where the middle class is
secure and growing, where inequality is on the decline
and where jobs provide ladders out of poverty. Or they
can work for a future where the profits of insurance
companies, speculators and outsourcers are secure.
There is no middle ground. Working America is waiting
for an answer. We are in a "show me" kind of mood, and
time is running out.
_____________________________________________
Portside aims to provide material of interest
to people on the left that will help them to
interpret the world and to change it.