Speech | Trade · Global Worker Rights

Trumka to Canadian Labor Movement: "It’s up to us to make a change."

Ottawa, Canada

Thank you, Sister Barb [Byers], for your kind introduction. It’s good to be back in Canada. I don’t get here enough, but I’m always happy when I do. Last August, I was coming this direction, but I overshot Canada a little bit and ended up in Alaska. Well, I got it right this time. Once again, thanks for having me.

Before I begin, I want to thank the Broadbent Institute and your chairman, Ed Broadbent, for inviting me to this important discussion about why labor must lead the progressive fight. I’m excited about this subject, because I believe it will lead our labor unions and our coalition of allies toward a new era of broadly shared prosperity.

I think the work your unions are doing here in Canada, and your political and community organizing are critical. I’ve learned something about your growing worker centers and the way you’re addressing issues specific to women, among your First Nations and with young workers.

Earlier this month, the AFL-CIO held our third Next Up Young Workers Summit. It was in Chicago, and it was the best one yet, and I am so glad to learn of the growing power of young workers in Canada. Keep up the good work!

It is so important for us to return to the core ideals of unionism. Our unions lift up working people, not just some, but all. And the more a group of workers is down, the more a group is hurting, the harder we have to fight and organize and advocate, because we are all, truly, connected.

Now I’d like to say a few words about the big new trade agreements our countries are proposing.

Today everybody knows how these so-called free trade agreements have hollowed out our national economies, and yet for some reason some people still believe these new deals involving our nations have merit.

I’m not against trade deals. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just against bad trade deals. But I am optimistic that our labor movements can work together to end a provision that’s on the table in both countries called ISDS, which stands for Investor-State Dispute Settlement. The ISDS is a secret tribunal where investors can challenge and override laws and regulations of democratically elected governments—and the provision threatens our environment, food safety, labor rights, human rights and more.

Nobody should get a secret tribunal. Working people don’t. We have a clunky, slow and ineffective process in Colombia, where 73 trade unionists were murdered in the three years after the Labor Action Plan. This is a tragedy. It’s terrible, and anyone with a lick of common sense can tell you that not only are these killings a human rights catastrophe, they are driving down wages and workplace standards in Colombia—and in every country that trades with Colombia.

And that’s in part why it’s so important to be standing in solidarity with the Canadian labor movement and your progressive community to demand that ISDS be taken out of our proposed deals and out of CETA. It’s a bad provision that places the value of an investor’s dollar over the lives of working people. It’s offensive. It’s wrong. And we stand against it.

Our work against bad trade policy in the United States, and our collaboration with you here, are part of a large, over-arching strategy in our labor movement to raise wages. Ending these bad trade deals will help us set the stage to raise wages. And we want to raise wages for all working people, because so much of what’s wrong in our economy stems from the disconnect between pay and productivity.

In the United States, wages have been stagnant for over a decade. In fact, between 1997 and 2012, the income of those in the bottom 90% fell by $3,000 while that of the top 1% almost doubled. This happened even as our productivity rose. This is not just a problem for our individual families. Economists everywhere agree that flat wages hurt our economies and depress demand.

The U.S. labor movement is working to enact minimum wage hikes, fair overtime rules, earned sick leave and other policy initiatives to raise wages in America. At the city and state level, our labor organizations have partnered with community allies to make all manner of positive change. In Los Angeles we’ve partnered with environmentalists, business groups and a dozen others to win investments in massive infrastructure projects that create good jobs and a more sustainable environment. In Seattle, we helped lead a coalition to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. San Francisco has a new Retail Workers Bill of Rights. Organizations like Jobs With Justice have been pivotal from coast to coast and across the country. They’ve won local rules against wage theft and have made progress on other important issues.

These local alliances have transformed politics, too, by electing true progressives in places as different as Los Angeles and Nebraska, and too many other places for me to name.

On a national level, our unions have partnered with groups of workers at Walmart and fast food restaurants to fight for better pay and working conditions. Those workers have started to win, and it feels good. The strength and courage of those workers is one of the most exciting things in the United States, and we’re proud to stand with them.

And yet we know from experience the single best way for working people to get and keep a raise is by asking for one with a collective voice. That’s why it’s important for every worker to be able to form a union on the job.

The International Monetary Fund, hardly a leftist group, and the OECD recently released studies tying rising inequality to the attacks on collective bargaining rights.

It’s up to us to make a change.

This vision of raising wages, and the broader idea of the dignity and decency that raising wages represents, can unite a broad range of organizations.

It’ll help us grow a bigger coalition, because, you see, raising wages is one link that binds social and economic justice.

Our campaigns to end mass incarceration and to win comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship, for example, are central to our work to raise wages.

It’s the right thing to do—but these are also work issues. Eleven million workers who are American in every way but on paper are easily denied fundamental workplace rights and decent wages because unscrupulous employers call the immigration cops when workers try to organize. That happens, even in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. And it’s fundamentally wrong. The United States is a nation of immigrants. We were built by immigrants. We remain an immigrant nation today, and I believe in the immigrant dream of coming to America to work hard and get ahead to build a better life, and my union values tell me to celebrate this dream.

When it comes to mass incarceration, one in 15 black men is in the U.S. prison system today, while fewer than one in 100 white men are in the system—even though black and white men commit crime at roughly the same rate. This is unjust and it’s tearing apart our communities. We are criminalizing a huge population of black men, and the practice is suppressing wages because millions of people who have served their time remain locked out of the job market by employers who screen applicants for felony convictions. Working people are affected on all sides of this issue, including police and corrections officers, whose jobs are made more dangerous by mandatory sentencing laws and prison overcrowding.

Labor rights, social justice and economic justice cannot be separated, cannot be isolated. When your rights are targeted, mine are in danger. We’ve seen that again and again and again. That’s why labor must lead the progressive fight.

We know how to stand together. We know to call injustice out for what it is, and fight to make it right. We know how to rally, when your picket line is my picket line and my picket line is your picket line.

And when we win, we all win. That’s the beauty of a raising wages world.

And let me tell you, we’re gonna win. We’re fighting to win. This year, in the United States, 5 million union workers are bargaining contracts. It’s the biggest year for bargaining in recent American history, and we’re going to raise wages.

We’re standing together with union workers, nonunion and never-heard-of-union. We’re standing together, and we’re winning. In one day last month—one 24-hour period—we saw Communications Workers and Electrical Workers in New England win raises. We saw Communications Workers in Brooklyn win a first contract, with strong wage increases. And we saw 500,000 workers win raises from Walmart! A dozen other retailers have raised wages. The latest one was Target.

About those wins, I like to say if some is good, more is better. We want more. We want better. We want raising wages.

Brothers and sisters, if you take away one thing from my talk today, I hope it’s this: The interests we have as working people span all the things that could divide us, and as institutions, our unions do, too. Nothing and nobody can match the breadth and scope of labor unions, when we unite with allies and partners who share our vision and our values.

The challenges of working people are legion. We’ve got political opponents who want to take us out. In the United States, we’ve got governors falling over themselves to sign right-to-work laws to make it harder for working people to bargain for a better life. Here in Canada, you’ve got politicians who are itching to take the worst policies from the United States and use them on you. I know you are fighting against bad legislation, C-377 and C-525, two bills that would make it harder for unions to organize and bargain. You’ve got to beat back those bills from the Conservative government. The corporate rightwing doesn’t get it, they’re stuck in the past. We’re the future.

Sisters and brothers, all of this is why I say now is a great time to be a trade unionist. We are engaged in the struggle of our time! Coalition work is hard, but it’s the best way to grow because when we stand together, the numbers are on our side. Standing together is how we’ll build a strong economy. Raising wages works. It works economically. It works politically. It’s the right thing to do, and it’ll work for every single one of us, and all of you, for our whole society.

This is our day. This is our time. Our rights, our voice, our power. Canada needs you. We’ll stand together. We’ll win together. We can do better. We will do better. We’ll march for it, sisters and brothers. We’ll fight for it. We’ll keep building, and winning, together!

Thank you!

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