I am honored to be with you, the lawyers of the labor movement, here in New Orleans.  I was fortunate enough to have been with you in San Francisco, when we founded the LCC tradition of taking action together, not in the courtroom or the law library, but in the street in support of working people.  And I congratulate you for carrying on that tradition here in New Orleans — in a place and a time when the injustice is so great it cannot be suffered in silence.

You are the heirs of a great tradition in American life — the tradition of lawyers who, by virtue of your education, talents and hard work, could have reaped great material rewards by serving the well off and the powerful — but who have made a different choice.

You have chosen to serve the people who do the real work of our society – who build our buildings, who teach our children.  The people who run into burning buildings when everyone else runs out.  The people who dig the coal and run the power plants and fix the power lines and tend the mentally ill and collect the garbage.  The people who clean the hospitals and drive the trucks and stock our supermarkets and work in this very hotel and thousands like it.

You made this choice because you care about what happens to working people and our country and our world.  And I think you agree with me that as a labor movement and a nation, we aspire to something bigger than the lonely selfishness and the greed that are the ruling themes of our national life today.

This session today is the third session you have held on the themes of economic and social justice.  You have heard from the people who have led the fight for working people here in Louisiana after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  You have heard from Bill Spriggs and Bob Kuttner, two of the most thoughtful economists in our country, and from one of our leading union leaders, Larry Cohen, about the class war that is being waged on the vast majority of Americans by those who wield economic and political power in America today.

Our country is at a tipping point because powerful interests have abandoned working families and our communities.  Now I want to tell you what the American labor movement has to say in response.

First, I want to say that we object.

We object to public leaders who leave people to die as flood waters rise and condemn their children to disease and ignorance when the flood waters recede.  We object to leaders who – instead of sending help – send mercenaries, bulldozers and real estate speculators.  We object to leaders who relish falling wages, who conspire to rip off pensions and health care, and who reward lawlessness as long as the criminal’s name ends in the letters “I-N-C.”

We object to companies that believe promises are made to be broken, that bankruptcy is a strategy for executive self-enrichment.  That $100 a day is excessive pay for a laborer — but $100 million a year sounds like a reasonable annual salary for a CEO.  We object to companies that think dead coal miners are just another cost of doing business — whether those miners are in Sago, West Virginia or Szechuan China.  And we object to politicians who act like money changers in the temple of our republic, who feed the public on a diet of hatred and bigotry with one hand while they pick our pockets with the other, who persecute the immigrant and coddle the employer who exploits her.

But brothers and sisters, the labor movement is about much more than objecting.

We’re working for a different vision of America – a vision that is bigger than any list of issues or any voting scorecard.  We preach the gospel of solidarity and the dignity of the individual — that no one should be reduced to a mere element of someone else’s economic calculus.  And most of all that we are not each on our own.

Not far from here in Baton Rouge, I saw our solidarity take the physical form of truckloads of aid from union members across our country – toothbrushes and shoes and detergent and toys – every imaginable item a person might need to start life over — shipped by local unions all across America here to the Gulf.

I know firefighters who worked to rescue people for days straight until they collapsed — not knowing where their own families were.  We all saw reporters and camera crews wading through sludge and confronting politicians to get the true story out about the human tragedy and political collapse of Katrina in the Gulf.  They were union members too.

And what does our vision tell us about where our country needs to go?  We hear a lot of talk about freedom these days — and too often this word is a cover for ugly lies.  But I want to talk about the hope embodied by the real meaning of freedom.  I think of the deep truth in Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms – our country and our economy has changed immensely since FDR laid them out, but these values are timeless.  Freedom of speech.  Freedom of religion.  Freedom from want.  And freedom from fear.

Roosevelt’s four freedoms are not the weak tea of neo-liberal public policy we are served by many of our so-called friends and allies.  They are profound principles that separate the just from the unjust government, the republic from the tyranny, the good society from the government by and for the “haves” and the “have-more’s.”

What does freedom from want mean?  It means education, health care, retirement, leisure time and fair wages — and not just for those of us fortunate enough to belong to a union.  Gutted pensions that leave people working into old age against their will and facing disease without the ability to pay the doctor and the hospital are not freedom from want.  Neither are wages that fall while productivity and prices rise – or an economy where most of us work longer and longer hours and go deeper and deeper into debt.  All around us here in New Orleans is a society where “want” is on the march – inexcusable want – want in the midst of plenty, want that afflicts people of color in disgraceful proportions.  Want that is the enemy of everything the labor movement was, is and will be.

What does freedom of speech mean?  It means that when we pick up the phone or sit at our computer keyboard, we should be able to do so with the knowledge that the government is not listening.  And it means that every American should be free to form a union, to speak at work with fellow workers or to their employer about important workplace issues without fear of being punished.

And freedom of religion?  In our lifetimes, the American labor movement has never really been called upon to defend our freedom of religion – of conscience.  Compared to the America I was born into – where people questioned whether you could be a good Catholic and a good American – we are fortunate to live in a country where freedom of religion has truly taken hold.  But which way are we going now?  How does it feel to be a Muslim in America today?

And what does freedom from fear mean?  As you know better than I, it means first of all the rule of law and not of “might makes right.”  It means that when you sit at peace in your home with the people you love – regardless of their race, nationality, religion, or gender – you can do so secure in the knowledge that your government will not foment hatred against you, that you cannot be jailed without a trial, that torture is something “bad people” do in other countries and that if a disaster should befall you — flood or fire or storm — your government will be prepared and eager to help.  And it means that the workplace is not a place where you surrender your dignity and your rights and become prey to every possible fear, but a place where the creative and cooperative spirit finds full expression.

Simply reminding us what this country and its President once stood for brings me personally a great sense of how important the labor movement is today.  Sometimes it feels that these last few years have been one great fight – and that fight is not over, not by a long shot. 

And it’s not just a political fight — it’s a fight about the very survival of the labor movement as a force in the American workplace.  It’s a fight about whether that workplace is a place of dignity — or of absolute employer power.  It’s a fight over the basic question of whether workers have rights at work, over whether health care and pensions are fundamental to having a decent life – or luxuries that only CEO’s and investment bankers get to enjoy.

And while these values are absolutes, they must be made real in policies and through action.  That’s what our Voice at Work campaign is about — mobilizing American society to protect freedom of speech and the right to organize.  And that’s what our effort together with the Economic Policy Institute to craft an economic agenda for working people is all about — to make real the promise of freedom from want.  And that’s what our initiative to hold members of Congress accountable on where they stand on retirement security for all Americans is all about — to take away the growing fear that old age will once again mean poverty for many Americans.

I have asked the AFL-CIO’s organizing director Stewart Acuff and our political director Karen Ackerman to come and talk to you about exactly how we are going to wage that fight — about our organizing efforts and our political efforts and how you can help.

And America’s workers need your help — to protect our right to speak freely in the workplace, to organize and bargain, and to protect our right to vote and have our vote counted.  Your efforts in 2000 and 2004 to protect the right to vote were important moments — and you will be needed again this year.  The enemies of democracy are on the move trying to block voter registration and keep people from the polls — just ask anyone driven from New Orleans by Katrina who tried to vote last month.

But before I call on Stewart and Karen, I want to say a few words about the state of our movement that must wage this fight.  When I was elected President of the AFL-CIO in 1995 along with Rich Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson, we believed the labor movement had to change and revitalize itself and that we had to act as one to take on the great fight to reverse our long-term decline in membership and economic and political power.  Ten years later, while we have seen many great changes and improvements, we believe just as strongly in the need for unity and for change as we did in 1995 – actually, more strongly.

But today we have been through a painful split in our ranks.  Many of you who are in private practice have clients that at a national level are no longer affiliated with the AFL-CIO.  We did our best to prevent that split.  And I am very pleased that through initiatives like the Solidarity Charters program — through which more than 1000 local unions of the disaffiliated internationals have stayed affiliated with the AFL-CIO State Federations and Central Labor Councils — we remain in many ways one labor movement in fact as well as spirit.

Our task today is to build upon and extend that unity, to resolve the issues that divide us rather than harp upon them.  And in truth, the number of these issues has been exaggerated.  There is no truth, for example, to the assertion that we are divided on the relative importance of organizing and politics.  The AFL-CIO shares our former affiliates’ devotion to organizing and they share our commitment to political action.  As you will hear shortly, organizing and political action are inextricably connected — we have no choice but to make them both priorities.

But let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind – this current situation has to change.  We are in reality one movement nationally as well as locally — and we need to be unified to work on change together.  That’s why the agreement in March bringing NEA locals into the AFL-CIO is so important.  That’s why our partnership with AFSCME, the Firefighters, AFT and SEIU to protect public pension plans is so important.  Every day Rich and Linda and I work at healing this breach and maintaining the effectiveness of the labor movement.  But we at the Federation cannot control everything.

What we do control is whether we are doing everything we can – and then some – to help working people fight for the future of this country.

And now Karen and Stewart are going to tell you how we are doing just that.

Thank you.