Together with Rich Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson and the support of our union brothers and sisters, we have reached many milestones in the past 10 years.
And I promise you this: As long as I am president of the AFL-CIO, I’m going to work harder every day to move this great union movement forward into the future.
One of my greatest responsibilities as your president is to be honest with you when things go wrong, and this is one of those times. Despite the best efforts of a lot of good people, two of our largest unions have taken the drastic—and harmful—step to break away from this great federation.
Their actions are a grievous insult to all the unions in our federation that have helped them in their efforts throughout the years. But most of all, it is a tragedy for working people. Because at a time when our corporate and conservative adversaries have created the most powerful anti-worker political machine in the history of our country, a divided movement hurts the hopes of working families for a better life.
And that makes me very angry. The labor movement belongs to all of us—every worker—and our future should not be dictated by the demands of any group or the ambitions of any individual.
So we will go forward to meet our future. And that future includes the far-reaching plans approved this past week by AFL-CIO delegates to carry our union movement forward.
We will begin building the new power we need by a huge shift of AFL-CIO resources into organizing, so we can ratchet up strategic campaigns aimed at the likes of Wal-Mart, Comcast and Clear Channel—and so we can provide serious incentives to encourage our affiliates to invest more and work harder and smarter to bring in new members.
We are substantially increasing the resources we are putting into mobilizing our members for political and legislative action and are transforming the way we do both.
We are changing the focus of our political work by mobilizing close to the ground—in our states and local communities—where we have the people-power to get our country moving on an upward path. And to make it happen, we will bring our state federations and labor councils from the back row to the front row in our march toward justice.
We approved more leadership training and development for women and people of color and are increasing our outreach to younger workers. For the first time in our history, our national affiliates will sign a set of diversity principles and the AFL-CIO Executive Council as well as our state federations and central labor councils will develop plans to achieve targeted levels of diversity by the 2009 Convention. At that Convention, we will require all delegations reflect the diversity of their members.
We are opening up a new front to challenge abusive corporate power by creating industry coordinating committees that will develop strategic organizing and bargaining plans and enforce contract standards.
And we are intensifying our campaign to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and guarantee all workers the freedom to form or join unions and we will approve a plan to double the size of our new community affiliate, so by 2006 WORKING AMERICA will have 2 million members.
In crafting these bold plans over the past several months, we not only solicited big proposals for change from our affiliates, we asked for ideas and comments from our rank-and-file members and activists. More than 9,000 of them responded.
Wendy Weathers, a CWA Local 9415 member in Livermore, Calif., had this to say: “I know for a fact that the benefits I have did not come from the kindness of AT&T executive officers’ hearts.”
And Joe Sullivan from Great Falls, Va., summed it all up when he wrote: “No union. No middle class. It’s that simple.”
Despite the conflicts and even the divisions we’ve suffered, the unions that are in the federation today are more unified and committed than ever. I think we all feel a new sense of clarity about our mission and new energy propelling us toward our goals.
The changes we are making this week are an ambitious blueprint. And we will proceed confidently knowing that we will overcome any obstacles because we care.
We care enough to fight for our members.
We care about our families and about working families here in our country and around the world.
Most of all, we care about each other and that’s what creates the solidarity that is at the core of our movement and at the center of our lives.
We care and because we care, we will confront our challenges and our challengers alike.
We will meet them with fight.
We will meet them with commitment.
We will meet them with courage.
We will struggle together—and stand together and fight together—until we win together.
|
|
