Good afternoon.  It’s a great day—because we are doing two really important things.  We are celebrating the start of work on the energy-efficient retrofit of this building—the House of Labor—and we are welcoming to the House of Labor President Bill Clinton, as well as mayors from around the country who are taking leadership on investing in our nation’s future, and the leadership of the Council of Institutional Investors, representing over $4 trillion in assets.
 
I have to tell you that today’s celebration has its origin in--of all places--a restaurant in Switzerland, where President Clinton and I talked about what we could do to create jobs and take on the challenge of climate change—and how working people could step up and invest where banks and Wall Street had failed.
 
The truth is that President Clinton and the AFL-CIO had been working on parallel tracks toward the same goals for years, but after that night, we brought our efforts together and we have made great strides.

In 2011, the labor movement committed as part of the Clinton Global Initiative to help facilitate $20 million in investment in energy-efficient retrofits-- to stoke the market for commercial and industrial energy retrofits.

And since then the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust alone has invested over $394 million in retrofits of multi-family housing projects—creating over 1500 jobs, and ULLICO has partnered with the state of Oregon to finance the retrofit of public schools.

We committed to working with our members’ pension funds to move over $10 billion in capital into job-creating infrastructure.  Since then, worker pension funds from coast to coast have allocated over $2.4 billion—led by CALPERS, CALSTERS, and NY Teachers—whose representatives are with us tonight. And we have just begun.

We also said we’d help train the workforce of the future, committing with the nation’s building trades unions to upgrade the skills of 100,000 tradespeople and enroll 40,000 new apprentices. The Building Trades met that goal by more than double in the first year.

And we said we would retrofit our headquarters—we would lead by example. And so here we are today.  Through a partnership with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the federation will improve the energy efficiency of this building by more than 20 percent, create more than 30,000 hours of skilled construction work, lower our carbon consumption and improve the functions and comfort of the building.

The retrofit will replace and upgrade the existing windows and deploy a new lighting system, and we will operate the building and its utilities more efficiently. One important partner in the actual work itself is McKinstry, which is overseeing the project.

In this, I can’t say enough about the roles played by Ed Hill, president of the IBEW, and Sean McGarvey, president of the Building and Construction Trades Department—and the same goes for AFT president Randi Weingarten, who has absolutely spearheaded these efforts.

Finally, I want to say a word about the people who work in this building, who literally keep the lights on.  When we started this project, our team went to talk to Mark Zobrisky, our building manager, and our team of operating engineers – Steve Worrey, Mike Harris, Jim Coby, and David Watkins. And they came to the meeting with memos, magazine articles, and blueprints.  They had been planning and hoping for the chance to take on the challenge of retrofitting the building.  And their knowledge and skills are what has gotten us to this point.  So in every sense this is a workers’ project.

And it has a larger meaning, Working people believe in the promise of America. We’re investing our time, our energy and our resources into American projects for America’s future, because that’s how we make that future come true.  And we have a lot of work to do.  Our nation’s infrastructure deficit is $3 trillion and counting.  Millions need work.  Pension funds need returns.  All of us—workers and our unions, our pension funds, government—all need to step up and do our part.

And we’re proud to do our part. And now let me call on the dynamic president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten.

Brothers and sisters, every now and then, someone comes along whose force of personality and strength of vision can bring together people and organizations in a truly remarkable, truly special way. One such man is with us today. There are not many people like him. Simply put, he’s a superstar. President Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative have been great partners on our work on infrastructure and green jobs. I’m not sure there’s anything Bill Clinton can’t do, and I’m proud and humbled to stand beside him and to call him a friend. Please join me in welcoming President Bill Clinton.