Thank you, Ken. Good morning, UAW!  Great to be here – Bob and Dennis and your top drawer leadership. I hope no one is hurting too bad from staying up too late. That episode of Downton Abbey kept us all on the edge of our seats last night! Actually, the game was exciting wasn’t it? And the ads were great.
 
What about the car commercials?  What was your favorite ad? The Taco Bell commercial with the old folks (although slightly unsettling to watch) gave me hope for the future!

Welcome to Washington D.C. -- it’s a beautiful city with a lot to do and see.  Unfortunately, lately it’s also been the epicenter of political dysfunction. Along with our rare snowfall, we’ve also had more than our share of bluster and baloney.  Like the politicians who make it sound like the greatest, most dangerous threats to America’s future are Social Security and Medicare. Like John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell claiming the free enterprise system will collapse if we end tax breaks for shipping good jobs overseas—or if we force those poor drug companies to negotiate with the government over the prices of Medicare prescription drugs.

But the bluster-and-baloney crew keeps us in suspense, wondering what outrageous threat to blow up our economy will come next. Honestly, the congressional Republicans are behaving like a bunch of schoolyard bullies, aren’t they?

So the rest of us in D.C. are grateful that you’re here to set them straight. The UAW knows how to stand up to bullies—you know how to do it – case in point – you stood up to the politicians who yelled out, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt!”  You showed them!  They are eating those words now.  Wasn’t that the best part of the presidential campaign?  By the way, thank you for that!

I just have to spend a minute acknowledging your extraordinary president, Bob King. Bob has a laser focus on what it takes to lift up all workers—whether they live in Detroit or Jackson, Mississippi—into the kind of middle-class life the UAW has made possible for millions before them. Bob is one of our movement’s real innovators, showing how union members bring solutions to the table and building partnerships in the industry to bring good jobs back to the U.S. He understands the power and the importance of building a workers’ movement across the globe and right here at home in our communities.  I have a lot of love for Bob and what he does for our entire labor movement.  Thank you, Bob!

It’s good to see all of you here in Washington DC.  You probably heard, there was a big party here two weeks ago—the presidential inauguration, and I hope, wherever you celebrated Inauguration Day – here or at home, you felt every bit of the pride you deserve for what you and our whole movement accomplished in the recent election. Those election victories would not have happened without what you did to bring back the American auto industry, and without your relentless work to elect all those pro-working families candidates.  

And for all those people who want to write us off – look at what happened in Ohio – 70% of union members voted for Barack Obama delivering that critical state – clearly the union vote matters!! 

But elections don’t end on Election Night, do they? After the votes comes the accountability—time for us all to make sure the politicians we elected act like leaders—and lead for us. It’s not enough to elect good people. We have to stay just as active after the election as we were the week before. So we’ll hold our leaders accountable—and we’ll also push them further, in the right direction. We’ll keep on defining the battlefield—on our terms.

So when you’re on Capitol Hill, remember that’s your Congress —you belong there, and your elected officials will hear you, and through you they will hear the voices of millions of working men and women across our movement.

Fifteen hundred of you turned loose on Capitol Hill, and the most important message we can deliver to our friends on Capitol Hill is this:

Stand up to the school yard bullies. Stop the hostage-taking. Stop using this manufactured crisis as an excuse to attack our safety net.

I’m sure your agenda is clear, but I’ll just reinforce what you already know, we have to make sure the elected officials hear you loud and clear.  Oppose Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefit cuts and cancel the job-killing sequestration. There’s a logical alternative:   tell Wall Street and the richest 2% to pay their fair share—close the tax loopholes for offshoring that let them get away with paying zero taxes, and close the loopholes that bar the government from negotiating with drug companies to lower prescription drug costs.

Closing loopholes does not mean making working families pay more in taxes—we’ve already paid more than our fair share and we shouldn’t be punished because we’ve struggled for and won decent health care plans. They need to close the loopholes that enrich the already wealthy: Millionaires and billionaires can afford to pay their fair share now.

I know there’s more on your legislative and political agenda—here in D.C. and in your home states—like job creation; health care, TPP and immigration reform.  And your timing couldn’t be better.  Just a word on immigration reform -- The bi-partisan senate group announced its reform principles last week, and so did the president – we are launching a national campaign to ensure that Congress passes a genuinely comprehensive plan in 2013.  We have momentum and that’s why it’s so important that you’re here.

And when you go to Capitol Hill the entire labor movement is there, right along with you.

But, sisters and brothers, you’re going to Capitol Hill into a headwind, let’s admit it. I’m sure you saw the new numbers on union membership that came out recently—that was hard news to digest. We could get discouraged and throw our hands up, couldn’t we?  But none of us are quitters. So we’re going to look reality in the eye and start defining a better future for working people—not only by working for good laws and policies but also by building this labor movement for the future, building unions that work for the workers of tomorrow, building community partnerships that mean strength for working families, building new forms of representation that work for the workers who have been excluded from our labor laws. And we don’t have a minute to lose.

Let’s see if your coffee’s kicking in this morning, let’s have everyone stand up.  Okay, sit down if you’re over 40.  Now, if you’re over 35 sit down.  All of us sitting down right now are part of a generation of workers who enjoyed the benefits of a period of unprecedented union strength. Now think about the new generation of workers that follows ours. What do they need? What do unions have to offer them—what do we have to do to be able to offer them what we’ve had? All you young bucks can sit down now.

Unlike many of us here, young workers today may never have known a parent or brother or sister who belonged to a union. And we know from research that’s crucial to how young people think about unions—or if they think about us at all. We know that as fewer people have that family connection to a union, we’re losing their hearts and minds.

This next generation is full of promise—they make up the largest generation since the baby boom, the best educated, the most diverse and in many ways the most progressive generation -- they believe strongly in the value of inclusiveness, collective action and collaboration.

It’s up to us to be innovative enough to meet their needs, and to put our values into action so we can win back the hearts of the American public. That’s what it’s going to take if this movement we love is going to survive and thrive—and give the next generation and the generations after that what we’ve enjoyed.

And we can’t just talk about being innovative—we have to show the world our innovation—like what the UAW is doing -- bringing jobs back to the USA and moving the whole nation forward with green technology. And helping workers organize who are mistreated and have never had access to union representation—from carwash workers to college teaching assistants. And talk about innovation.  How about this campaign you’re moving in the South to help workers organize?

That’s one of the many ways you put your values into action and show that you care about workers beyond your current members. But you do these things in other ways too—bucket drops at Caterpillar, working with the auto companies to donate vans for veterans services, building urban gardens, building wheelchair ramps and raising funds and arranging legal services for survivors of Superstorm Sandy. When you’re out in the community, serving the community, you’re giving the public a different view of unions than the usual stereotypes they hear on FOX news.  This is how we start to reconnect with the public and recapture their hearts and minds. 

Being here in DC for your CAP Conference this year is especially meaningful, because it was almost 50 years ago that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—whose birthday we recently commemorated—delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech—which he wrote at a UAW hall at the invitation of Walter Reuther.

Dr. King knew that economic justice would never be handed to us—we would have to fight for it. The story of that fight is the story of the UAW.

Thanks for being here – and for being a strong and powerful force for working people. Have a great day on the Hill!