Good morning. It is such a pleasure to be here with you, the labor movement’s lawyers. All of you are such strong advocates for working people. I want to begin by thanking my friend and brother, Jon Hiatt, for inviting me to be with you today, and for everything he has done for working families. The labor movement’s legal community is truly fortunate to have Jon as your leader.
This is my first time with you since I had the great honor of being elected Executive Vice President of the AFL-CIO. But I do not feel like a stranger. We have marched together in New Orleans, and fought the good fight together in Florida and across this country.
Now, once again we have a chance to reclaim our nation. To take back what was stolen from us in Florida in 2000. To restore our confidence that we truly live in a nation of laws. To recapture our pride in our leaders and our esteem in the world. To recover our aspiration as a nation to embody the hopes of humanity, the hopes of those who work hard every day in every corner of our planet.
I know personally how much those people – our members and their families, workers who aren’t in unions – are depending on us because I was once where they are. I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. My mother was a domestic worker, but she didn’t have a union; my father was a construction worker – a day laborer – and he didn’t have a union. So we had it pretty rough at times. We had our family and our faith, but sometimes that wasn’t enough to put food on the table. Thanks to my mother, I was able to go to college and then I had a chance to go to work for a union – my union, AFSCME.
I took that chance and it changed my life forever. I was not only able to make a good living and enjoy decent benefits, I was able to become a union organizer and help others the way I’d been helped. Later, I was part of the New Voice team that helped elect John Sweeney President of the AFL-CIO, and when he asked me to join his staff it changed my life again.
I became executive assistant to Linda Chavez-Thompson, the first Executive Vice President of the federation and the first Latina to hold one of our top offices. I never dreamed I would one day be asked to succeed her, so now I have 56 unions on my side and I thank God for every one of them, and for every one of you in this hall today.
Brothers and sisters, history weighs heavily on us this year. We meet midway between two terrible anniversaries. April 4th was the 40th anniversary of the passing of our beloved Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And next month will be the 40th anniversary of the murder of Robert Kennedy at the end of a long Democratic primary battle.
As we’ve celebrated Dr. King’s life and work, and as we begin to remember the contributions of Bobby Kennedy, we’re reminded that people working together can bring about great change, that we can literally change the course of history. We know it because we’ve done it and now I see people coming together again all across our country.
Something very special is going on in America. We’ve seen it in the upsurge of voter registration during the Democratic primaries, we’ve seen it in impressive voter turnouts in state after state. People are not just angry and frustrated and upset at the direction of our country. They’ve moved on past that into a determination like we haven’t seen since the days of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, a determination to take back the reins of power and turn our country around. And we’re not talking about a left turn or a right turn, brothers and sisters, we are talking about a U-turn.
I was fortunate to be in Memphis last month and I was once again strengthened by the images of the brave sanitation workers Dr. King marched with and their slogan, “I Am A Man.” If those workers could stand up to injustice and for their right to have a union despite beatings, being called “boy” and worse – death threats and starvation – then we as a labor movement and as a people cannot fail to stand up and fight to reclaim our country.
Forty years ago, after Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were taken from us, our politics entered into a terrible downward spiral of division and frustration. We never were able to finish the work they began, so the great issues of that time — an unjust foreign war, a country grappling with the poisonous legacies of racism and sexism, poverty, health care, housing — they are the issues of today.
It is as if our nation’s political life has been frozen in place.
But something is happening now, brothers and sisters, you can feel the change coming. Americans want change in who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, change up on Capitol Hill, change in the U.S. Supreme Court – big, bold, beautiful change. As a woman and an African-American, I am so proud we at last have such a magnificent choice and a chance for change before us.
I am also proud that labor has helped change the debate over the direction of our country. Americans want to talk about the issues – they know the economy isn’t working. Now we are poised to go beyond debate and make those changes. But, of course, there will be those who will once again try to make this election about the slogans and code words designed to divide us, not the great challenges that we must come together as a nation to address.
In 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke to the AFL-CIO’s 4th Annual Convention about the very issues that face us today. He said, and I quote:
“A duality of interest of labor and the Negroes makes any crisis which lacerates you a crisis from which we bleed. As we stand on the threshold of the second half of the twentieth century, a crisis confronts us both.
“Those who in the second half of the nineteenth century could not tolerate organized labor have had a rebirth of power and seek to regain the despotism of that era while retaining the wealth and privileges of the twentieth century.
“Whether it be the ultra-right wing in the form of Birch societies or the alliance which former President Eisenhower denounced, the alliance between big military and big industry, or the coalition of southern Dixiecrats and northern reactionaries, whatever the form, these menaces now threaten everything decent and fair in American life. Their target is labor, liberals and the Negro people.”
Here we are 46 years later and Dr. King’s remarks to the AFL-CIO then are just as relevant today. The big difference is that the list of those most disdained by the ultra-conservative right wing has only expanded. It no longer includes just labor and the Negro and liberals — it now includes new immigrants of all races, gays and lesbians, and the working poor, who are disproportionately single mothers and people of color. It is precisely those on this list that we in the labor movement have aligned ourselves with in a coalition that will make possible the realization of the dream we all share for the economic and social justice Dr. King lived and died for.
But while we have made alliances, this election season has been divisive. No matter who we nominate for President, those who cannot tolerate us will try to perpetuate those divisions.
Brothers and sisters, we cannot let them divide us, because America surely is not ready for a third Bush term, and that’s just what John McCain is promising us – John McCain is George Bush.
We have had eight years of disastrous leadership. But in a way, George W. Bush is nothing but the logical conclusion of the ideas that have dominated our country since Ronald Reagan put a happy face on the very politics of privilege Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy warned us against.
After a generation of stagnant wages and tax breaks for the rich, we are in the midst of an economic crisis, a foreign policy crisis, and an energy crisis that are in fact all tied together and cannot be ignored any longer.
We have a health care crisis – 47 million uninsured, 9 million of them children. Here we are the richest country in the world; we can find $12 billion a month to spend on a war in Iraq that was waged on a lie about weapons of mass destruction, but we leave millions of our own citizens to fight a war against asthma, cancer, HIV-AIDs, and diabetes without the weapon of health care coverage.
We have a pension crisis — only 20 percent of the private-sector workforce is in a real pension plan — down from 50 percent in 1980.
We have an energy and environmental crisis and an infrastructure crisis. The price of gas goes up, bridges go down, and every day we move closer to ecological disaster.
And today as we gather here under this roof, millions of Americans are about to lose the roof over their head because of a system of deregulation that allowed our financial institutions to prey on millions of our most vulnerable, who simply wanted a piece of the American Dream – a home.
Of course, some people do get help — the billionaires who created the mess. We can move in the course of a weekend to bail out Wall Street, but we have to deliberate and debate when it comes to giving a helping hand to Main Street.
Because of this unregulated system, we are all suffering – as we see our own neighbors walk away from their homes, “For Sale” signs on every corner – and if we are fortunate enough to own a home, see our home equity decline. Wrong-headed policies, sisters and brothers.
These last couple of weeks, we have watched the horror in Burma and now in China. And we have watched President Bush talk about a government that won’t respond, that leaves its ethnic minorities to clean up their own dead, that can’t get water to people suffering in tropical heat.
Someone said to me, now does that sound familiar to you? Have we seen this bad movie before? Yes, we have, and the producer, director and star of our horror movie is the ideological agenda of George W. Bush.
Working people in the United States may not have suffered like the Burmese or the Chinese, but we have been calling for help for years, and no one has picked up the phone, not even President Bush on his red phone. We called at 3 a.m. and 3 p.m., but our calls went unanswered, no matter the time or the urgent reason for our calls.
Three million industrial jobs, good $20-an-hour jobs – gone – and no one answered the phone. Two million foreclosures, and, literally, the federal government phone lines to offer help were down. Our great city of New Orleans left a shell of itself – three years later, its schools still empty and abandoned. Five thousand Americans dead in Iraq, and more suicides than that among returning troops, and Dick Cheney says, “So?”
But the President sure answered the phone when the super rich who benefit from his tax policies and Bear Stearns called.
Brothers and sisters, I don’t know who will answer the phone on January 20th when we call the White House – it may be the first African-American, or perhaps the first woman, but we have to make sure it isn’t the man George Bush says can best continue down the path he has laid.
John McCain has voted with George Bush 89 percent of the time – last year it was 95 percent.
John McCain showed over and over again that he understood that George Bush was attacking the core of what our country was about — that torture and tax cuts for the rich were wrong, McCain just wasn’t in the right place when it came time to vote. He occupies that special place reserved for people with the insight, but without the backbone, without the integrity.
So for the AFL-CIO, we are already busy defining John McCain for our members — by launching our “McCainRevealed” website giving all the details of his awful voting record. And by sending demonstrators to speak the truth to power every time McCain attends another fancy fundraiser.
We’re letting the whole world know that John McCain voted against the minimum wage. We’re letting everyone know that McCain shows no interest in providing health care for 47 million uninsured – or bringing down crippling health care costs for the rest of us. He wants the market forces to take care of the problem.
We’re letting them know that he supports trade policies that send American jobs offshore – and don’t provide labor and environmental protections. And we are certainly letting them know that John McCain opposes the rights of workers to freely form and join unions to build a better future and that he voted against the Employee Free Choice Act.
But you don’t have to listen to us to figure out that John McCain is running to complete the damage George Bush has done. Just listen to the man himself — last week promising to appoint more judges like Alito and Roberts to our appellate courts. This means that just in case a worker or a union ever won a case at the NLRB or under the civil rights laws — you could be sure that a McCain judge would find some excuse, no matter how thin, to make sure the worker, the woman, the person of color, loses.
But this election cannot be only about John McCain’s failings. It must be about working people’s vision – our vision of a new direction for our country.
In the months to come, as we embark on this great fight, we will once again need your help. We have learned painfully that in this third century of our republic, we cannot take our right to vote for granted. We have to defend it.
There are people in our political system who think that voting is a privilege reserved for those like themselves, that it should be fenced in with tests and taxes, that it is fair and right to confuse and intimidate people into not voting.
I read last week their latest idea is that you have to show a birth certificate to vote. This is again what Dr. King was talking about all those years ago. How very sad for our country that the list of the disenfranchisers now begins with the Chief Justice of the United States of America.
But when I look out at all of you, I know there is hope for the legal profession and the legal system. We will need all of you again to protect the right of all Americans to vote, just as you did in Florida in 2000, and across our country in 2004 and 2006.
We are fortunate that LCC members Mindy Holmes and Lora Jo Foo are leading the voter protection effort for the AFL-CIO. You will be hearing from them, and I know you won’t be like George Bush and that we can count on you to answer the phone when those calls come – will you? I know you will and I know we will emerge from the elections with a stronger Congressional majority and a President who will stand up for working families.
But we have to look past the election and on to January and beyond, because our hopes and dreams are tempered with experience.
Because we know, as A. Philip Randolph taught us, and I quote:
“At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.”
To change our country, workers must organize for power. And we need more than organization – my hope is that we truly blossom into a much stronger movement. There is a difference between an organization and a movement. In an organization, you make the calls to turn people out to a meeting. In a movement, you make the calls to find a bigger hall than the one you had booked.
Recently, many of you in Southern California have offered your talents and effort to help immigrant workers who wash cars in the Los Angeles area. These workers are coming together with the Steelworkers Union and a broad coalition of community groups to see to it that the labor laws are enforced in their workplaces and to win their union.
That’s the kind of movement, and the kind of organization, we are looking for. The Cingular-AT&T Wireless campaign is what we’re looking for; the Casino dealers in Atlantic City, college faculty members and flight attendants organizing for respect and fairness, child care workers and homecare workers, residential construction workers in the Southwest, working people organizing a movement in state after state.
Yet today, although we have made some progress toward unity, our organizations are divided. But the AFL-CIO is convinced we are one movement. And we will have to start acting like one if we are going to achieve anything. Because what we know about politicians is this — they are hard to shake when they need money and hard to find when we need change.
We will need all our strength as a movement to make sure we get the change our members will vote for, and not just the same mush of Wall Street policies with excuses and flattery. If we can be divided and bought off for small change, we will be settling for crumbs – when what working Americans need is a full meal. And if that happens, this moment that is so full of promise will turn out to be just another spin of the revolving door of Washington.
The great test of whether we can make real change for working Americans will be passing the Employee Free Choice Act. It is about taking away fear — the fear of coming together to form a union. There can be no movement when there is fear. So the next Congress must pass – and the next President must not just sign but fight for – the Employee Free Choice Act.
Brothers and sisters, we have to seize this historic opportunity and not let it go, not let it slip away.
We are here between these two grim anniversaries. And as each day passes, I think more and more of Bobby Kennedy, a young man who at another time when people were being tested, found it within himself to take into the mainstream of American politics the unifying moral vision of Dr. King.
My friends, a debt is due. It is due to us — to our country. It is a debt soaked in Dr. King’s blood, and in Bobby’s blood – a debt in hanging chads and flooded homes and young men and women lost in faraway deserts.
Like any debt, it is a promise, a promise of “health care for all” that was never made good, a promise of dignity at work betrayed, the promise of an end to poverty forgotten.
It is the promise of America the beautiful. It is, in Dr. King’s last words, the pledge that “we as a people will reach the promised land.”
My friends, the debt has come due. It is time to collect. We are going to collect. You and I and the working people of this country, we are going to spark a movement of those who are ready to make their voices heard in shaping the new America we must build together – and we are going collect this November.
Thank you.
