Thanks to Bill Spriggs for his introduction and for the invitation to be here — and thanks to Bill for his continued leadership on the things that matter to all of us.  We’re especially thankful for the role he played in fending off the Bush raids on Social Security – we left the Bush Administration in shreds and they needed that kind of humiliating experience.

Also want to thank all of you for coming out to hear what labor has to say — and especially glad to see Dean James Donaldson and students here.  I’ll get in my commercial plug here.  In the labor movement, we really have some exciting career opportunities for passionate young people who are interested in social change.  Careers in economics, organizing, the law, labor-management relations, you name it.  So if you’re interested after what you hear today, please grab my arm before I leave.

I also want to use this opportunity to recognize the contributions of students all across our country when it comes to human rights, the anti-sweatshop movement, and the cause of workers’ rights here in our country – and around the world.  Without the student movement at Georgetown University, service workers on that campus never would have gained union representation.

The same is true all across the country and right now, of course, students at the University of Virginia are marching and fasting and sitting in and going to jail on behalf of the workers there.  It’s heartening to see such a rebirth of the student movement -- because for our country, it comes just in time.

Just to let all of you know where I’m coming from, let me introduce myself a little further by saying my mother and father were both immigrants from Ireland.  I grew up in the Bronx.  My mother was a domestic worker, my father was a New York City bus driver.  He was a member of a strong union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers union — and I’ll have a little more to say about Local 100 in a moment.

My early education at Iona College was in economics, and I’ve done my graduate studies for 50 years at the “University of Trade Unionism and Human Suffering.”  Before being elected President of the AFL-CIO — I was President of SEIU, the giant service workers union — and before that President of SEIU’s 70,000-member janitors union in NYC.

Those experiences combined don’t qualify me as an economist, or even as a labor research expert, but they’ve made my common sense compass pretty dependable.  And right now that compass tells me that the strongest capitalist democracy in the world is headed in a disastrous, self-destructive direction.

The contradictions we’re confronting are mind-boggling.  At a time when our nation is wealthier than at any time in our history, poverty and inequality of income and wealth are higher than they’ve been in 85 years.

At a time when CEO compensation and corporate profits are skyrocketing, workers’ wages are still stuck right there where they were in 1972.  15 million people are unemployed and many more have dropped out of the workforce altogether.  In my hometown of New York City, unemployment among black males is over 50 percent.

At a time when we’re sending our best jobs overseas by the millions – including “knowledge jobs” — we’re still barely creating enough jobs to match the growth in our workforce — and the jobs we are creating are low-wage, no-benefits jobs – with fewer rights and no prospects.

And at a time when our population is steadily growing older, we’re allowing employers to weaken and even destroy the guaranteed pensions that help make sure retirement security doesn’t come totally at the expense of individual taxpayers. 

And our health system is a wreck.

To compound the damage, the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year approved a Bush budget bill that dumps more medical costs onto poor families and seniors and whacks the loan program of the students we hope someday will be making enough money to keep our Social Security system afloat.

In the words of syndicated columnist Bob Herbert, and I quote:  “This is ugly stuff:  Mean-spirited legislators hacking like wild men with machetes at the already ragged safety net.  Poor children, the very sick and the disabled are among those most likely to fall into the abyss.”

Unions and industrial jobs in Detroit made African Americans in Detroit the highest paid African Americans in the country.  But what we are now witnessing is the largest redistribution of income and wealth in our nation’s history — one that is shrinking our middle class and ballooning our underclass.  It’s clearly class warfare — waged by the upper class.

Conservative politicians and the corporations they serve have put forth a set of integrated economic policies — which we call the “Wall Street Agenda” — to shift political and economic power as well as wealth away from workers towards employers and the super-rich.

The same Wall Street Agenda puts corporate profits over people and as a result we find a disregard for workers’ rights, human rights and the environment, whether it’s in America, Africa, Asia, or South America.

And they’re trying to spread their crackpot combination of tax cuts for the rich, free-market greed, austere economic policies, deregulation, privatization, and de-unionization around the world.  It is a strategy as short-sighted as it is selfish because its end game leaves businesses with goods and services they cannot sell because consumers don’t have enough money to spend or save.

And it leaves government at all levels with more and more demand for public services and subsidies and fewer and fewer tax dollars to pay for them.  That, my friends, isn’t just immoral and ugly — for a capitalist democracy, it’s just short of suicidal.

Earlier this month, we hosted a reception for Kevin Phillips at the AFL-CIO headquarters and his views on where this all takes us are frightening.  He says we’re abandoning a manufacturing economy for a financial services economy driven by insurance, banking, investment, and credit.  Similar shifts led to the decline of Holland in the 16th Century – Spain in the 17th century – and Great Britain in the 20th century.

In a recent speech, Bill Moyers addressed another side to the story by commenting on an analysis published by The Economist last year that documented, quote, “Great and growing income disparities.”  They found, Moyers said, that American corporations are no longer agents of upward mobility and that while 30 years ago the annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was 30 times that of the average worker, today it is 1,000 times.  The Economist, Moyers said, believes that the United States, quote, “risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based society.”

We’re faced not only with an economy that isn’t working for working families but a war that is destroying faith in our country, draining our resources and extinguishing many of our young lights, a Supreme Court now stacked with right-wing justices, and an administration that holds our constitution inoperative when it comes to spying on American citizens and leaking classified information.

These are multiple cancers that are eating away at our values and our nation and they are crying out loudly for cures.  Fortunately for working families as well as our myopic employers and elected officials, the “Wall Street Agenda” is beginning to flounder in its own excesses.

And with stories of corruption, illegality and incompetence still pouring out into the public, the Administration as well as the majority party in Congress is doing a great job of destroying its own credibility.

In developing countries in South America where the “Wall Street Agenda” has failed – poor families and the working class are already in open revolt.

Here in the United States, worker insecurity and frustration are at record levels and senior citizen anxiety is spilling over into the political arena. 

Fortunately, we’re already deep into an election year and there are some signs of change.  Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich – all people – suggested that we simply ask working families, “Have you had enough?  Have you had enough?”

It is in this environment that our unions are facing the most daunting challenges we’ve ever encountered — and perhaps the most exciting opportunities we’ve had in many years.  It is our job to lead the progressive movement and to speak for working families and poor families.

In order to do that we’ve launched the most aggressive political mobilization in our history to educate and mobilize our members and their families and to regain control of our government and our agenda.  And we’re lucky because we are a diverse movement with members in every neighborhood – every community – every church in our nation.

Of course, our movement is also under constant attack from greedy corporations, from the Bush Administration, and from employers.  One of those attacks took place earlier this year when members of Local 100 of the Transport Workers had to go out on strike in New York, forced there by an employer that had plenty of money to meet their reasonable demands.

I took a special interest in that strike because I’m a native New Yorker and Local 100 was my father’s union.  I was proud of the way the workers stuck together in the face of all the race-baiting and labor-bashing and they achieved a great victory — they demonstrated what real solidarity can achieve.

Of course, that victory has now been dismantled by a federal judge who has fined this fairly small union $2½ million dollars – cut off the union’s dues collecting capability – and is sending the union president, Roger Toussaint, a Caribbean immigrant, to jail.

To add insult to injury, the New York Ports Authority has now rejected a vote by the workers accepting the new contract and is insisting that the dispute be settled by arbitration, which, of course, will take months and months.  It should come as no great surprise that Local 100 is a predominantly black union, and the transport workers are some of the most under-compensated workers in New York.

Our experience as a labor movement in the aftermath of Katrina is another reminder of our nation’s slide back to a class-based society.  We were all horrified at the sight of the victims when they were waiting to be rescued and stunned that the vast majority were African-American.

The AFL-CIO and many other organizations plunged into the relief effort, raised millions and millions of dollars, and we’re about to announce a huge investment of our pension funds in helping rebuild low and moderate income housing in the city – so important because priority must be given to affordable housing.  Sad to say private sector investment has been painfully slow in coming and the federal government has continued to largely ignore the needs of the city despite the economic impact of the devastation on the entire Gulf Coast region.

The Bush Administration moved quickly to suspend Davis Bacon – we had to fight to get it back and I thank Bill Spriggs for all he did to speak out and the state moved to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of New Orleans public school teachers — it’s just an outrage.

To add insult to injury, now we are seeing the federal government ignore the violation of voting rights in the New Orleans elections scheduled for tomorrow. 

Needless to say, one cannot even imagine this kind of neglect of a city that was majority white instead of majority black and it is the shame of our nation.

The attacks on labor and the neglect in New Orleans have brought our movement together at this critical time and I can report that we are more committed and organized than ever.  Our entire movement is united in our continuing quest for good jobs, healthy communities, and equality for working families.

Our country is headed in the wrong direction — and we’re determined to start turning it around in the elections this Fall when we get a chance once more to hold our elected leaders accountable.

Someone once said, “There are two things we must give our children.  One is roots and the other is wings.”  When I was growing up in the Bronx, our family and our church provided the roots and my dad’s union provided the wings — in the form of a good job with decent benefits so he and my mom could lift up me and my brother and sisters.

The American labor movement remains the wings of hope for working families — and with your continued help and support we will continue to spread those wings wide on behalf of equality and economic and social justice.

Thank you and God bless all of you and your families, and God bless America.