Speech to Congress 2008 by Arlene Holt Baker
Speech to Congress 2008 by Arlene Holt Baker
AFL-CIO Executive Vice-President. TUC Congress, Tuesday 9 September 2008
Good morning - and thank you Dave (Prentis) for your warm introduction ... it's a pleasure to be with you all today.
I bring you greetings from my partners at the AFL-CIO - President John Sweeney and Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka - and from our entire AFL-CIO Executive Council ... and they join me in celebrating over 114 years of friendship with the TUC and with all of you.
I'm joining you here just a week after we in the United States observed Labor Day, and I bring you a good report - we had marches and rallies in hundreds of cities ... I was in Maine and New Hampshire ... Rich Trumka was in Pittsburgh and in Lorain,. Ohio ... President Sweeney was in Detroit, Michigan, where he marched and introduced our Presidential candidate to a crowd of more than 70,000 workers and their families.
Most of the crowd, of course, came to see President Sweeney ... but we have to give Barack Obama some of the credit
I'm also here just 10 days after we finished our Democratic Party Convention in Denver, Colorado, where I can report that more than one-quarter of the delegates were from union households.
A special thanks to Brendan Barber, Guy Ryder, John Monks and John Evans who were able to join us at this historic convention.
... and it has been only a few days since Hurricane Gustav threatened our wonderful city of New Orleans ... and we have three more big storms bearing down on our shores.
But even with all that weather activity, I can honestly say that the biggest winds sweeping across America are the winds of change ....
With those winds at our back, we have an opportunity not only to elect our candidate as President ... but to take control of both houses of our Congress ... and beginning to 'Turn Around America' ... by not only returning control to working families ... but returning America to its cherished position as a leader in the struggle for dignity and freedom around the world.
This election is so important to all of us because current global economic policies have failed workers worldwide.
We must work together to ensure that the benefits of globalisation are broadly shared and that working people have a voice in the policies that shape our lives.
We must work to ensure that corporate power does not go unchecked, that we build enforceable labor and environmental standards into our trade agreements, and that protection of the environment and the interests of workers are priorities - not afterthoughts - in our nation's economic policies.
This year, the choices given to voters have never been more clear.
We can continue on the course charted by George W Bush and the right-wing forces represented by John McCain that have propelled us into a deepening recession ... inflicted severe damage on our labour movement ... undermined the social and education programs so many of our citizens depend upon ... and mired us deeply into a war in Iraq we should not even be involved in ... a war in Iraq that has to stop ...
Or we can radically alter our course through, as Barack Obama puts it, 'Change we can believe in.'
Those changes include a universal health care system ... a massive plan to create jobs, stimulate our economy and get our country back on its feet ... immigration reform that includes providing a clear path to citizenship for undocumented workers ... and a sweeping reform of our labor laws so all workers have the freedom to join unions.
Those changes include recognising that climate change is the most pervasive form of globalisation because the atmosphere recognises no borders. We must work together with an environmental and economic development strategy to clean the planet and create good jobs. We stand at the crossroads of opportunity for investments in innovation, new technology and energy efficiency that will save jobs, create new jobs and new industries. And, like the TUC, we recognise that there is no guarantee that these will be good jobs or that the needed investments will be made unless we fight to make it so.
They are changes that cannot come too soon for our people and our country.
In the United States, workers' wages - when adjusted for inflation - are frozen right where they were in 1973, over 35 years ago.
Those stagnant wages have forced more and more family members into the workforce ... but even then, we still have the widest wage and wealth gap of any industrialised nation in the world.
In the United States, the average corporate CEO now makes about 400 times what the average worker makes, and the next highest ratio in the world is right here in your country, where the average CEO makes about 35 times what a worker makes.
In America, 8.5 million people actively looking for work cannot find a job ... because of our mortgage crisis, 3 million families go to bed every night wondering whether they will have a roof over their heads in the morning ... 47 million people go without health care coverage every day ... employers are eliminating workers' pension benefits.
On top of all this, we are waging an unjust war in Iraq that costs us more than $10 billion a month ... while we leave millions of our citizens alone to fight their personal wars against HIV0-AIDS, diabetes, obesity and cancer.
As I travel constantly around our country, union members tell me they are fed up with taking it on the chin ... they are ready for radical change ... and it is their anger and frustration that caused the nomination of Barack Obama and Joe Biden ... and will lift them into the offices of President and Vice President.
But our AFL-CIO goal is much higher than that - we are working to increase our daunting majority in our House of Representatives and to elect a veto-proof, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
We passed the Employee Free Choice Act in the House, but it failed in the Senate ... and so we need to pick up at least 9 more Senators in order to have what we need to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and, indeed, all the other national changes we need to make.
How important is Employee Free Choice?
Consider this: our unions are now bringing in about 500,000 new members every year, but that's barely enough to cover the growth in our workforce or to replace the members we lose every year to globalisation and technology. Yet our surveys and polls show there are 60 million workers in our country who say they would join a union in a heartbeat if they had the opportunity?
Why don't they take the opportunity? Because employers in our country are free to do almost anything they like to defeat union organising campaigns - threats, intimidation, discrimination against union supporters, forced attendance at anti-union meetings on company time, firing of union supporters in one of every four union campaigns.
We have a lot at stake in these elections, so we are running the biggest membership education and mobilisation campaign in our history.
Even with all this, some of our members are still considering voting for John McCain. I like to think it is because they don't know Barack Obama, but we all know there are also other - more irrational - reasons.
We will remind those members that John McCain voted with George Bush more than 95% of the time, and that a vote for John McCain is a vote against working families.
Last week, as John McCain received his party's nomination, AFL-CIO volunteers were going door-to-door in more than 100 cities across our country....giving a jump-start to the 510 candidates we're backing in races from state government to Congress to the White House.
Between now and November 4th, we will execute the most intense grassroots campaign this country has ever seen - 250,000 union volunteers....10 million door knocks....25 million pieces of mail....70 million telephone calls...20 million worksite contacts...followed by a massive, four d-day Get-Out-the Vote drive...and the most aggressive Voter Protection Program we've ever conducted.
On Election Day, voters from Union households will represent more than 25 percent of voters at the polls, and with that kind of participation from working families, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will win...and we will win the Senate seats we need.
What we want to do is bring back the better America we all once knew...the better America that helped the world pull itself up from Worldwide Depression...the better America that came to the aid of the allies in World War II...the better America that always relied on diplomacy over invasion...consensus over unilateral action...the better America that was a beacon of hope for anyone seeking freedom and economic and social justice.
In this election year, many Americans are mindful of the legacy of two of our most treasured leaders who were murdered just a few months apart 40 years ago - Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
So much of this election is about the dream and vision that they had for a more equalitarian America. Forty years later, we stand on the threshold of fulfilling the dreams of the dreamer - turning America around - and putting us back on course toward an economy that works for all in America. We know that the world is watching.
Thank you
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