AFL-CIO pledges ongoing support for working women as fight to create jobs continues. . .

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More than 100 years since the first celebration of International Women’s Day, the AFL-CIO today honors the improvements made for working women over the past century.  But today also serves as a reminder of just how far we still have to go to achieve equal pay, rights, and respect for working women, both here in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />U.S. and around the globe. 

The AFL-CIO has a history of advocating for working women—most recently, signing on to the International Trade Union Confederation

(ITUC) and Global Union Federations’ Global Campaign for Decent Work, Decent Life for Women in 2008.  "The AFL-CIO has a long-standing commitment to gender equality in the workplace," AFL-CIO Secretary- Treasurer Liz Shuler said.  "And today we're reaffirming that commitment, standing firm with workers around the world to call for a more equitable and inclusive future for women."

In the U.S., women’s presence in the workforce and in labor unions is  still on the rise.  Women now make up nearly half of union members and over half of the total workforce, but remain disadvantaged relative to men in the vast majority of labor markets, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO). 

In addition to higher poverty rates and the ongoing prevalence of sexual and domestic violence, the United Nations reports that women earn between 30 and 40 percent less pay than men for equivalent work. 

And in the wake of the financial collapse, women in the U.S. are shouldering the added burdens of sky-high unemployment, rampant foreclosures, and inadequate access to health care. 

It’s clear that the jobs crisis is a crisis for working women.  But like the women who marched in New York City over 100 years ago for shorter working hours, better pay, an end to child labor, and the vote, women today are fighting back.  As labor readies for a massive campaign to create the jobs our country desperately needs, the AFL-CIO is proud to stand with them in that fight.

Speech Given AFGE’s Field Services & Education Department Director Bill Fletcher, Jr. During AFGE’s Annual Legislative Conference

Good afternoon and thank you.  I am very honored to have been asked to address this conference.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

I want to begin by giving a very special thanks to the Creator of all things on this, the 21st birthday of my little girl.  So, I hope to do her proud.

I am going to be brutally honest with you, so I ask your forgiveness in advance if my remarks unsettle you.  The union movement is in a rut.  Too many of the leaders of organized labor seem to have forgotten certain historical truths.  Let me remind you of one such truth.

In 1857 a great leader in the struggle for justice offered the following observations:

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." 
 

He went on to say:

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” [Frederick Douglass]

We, in organized labor, seem to get confused as to the difference between “requests” and “demands.”  We sometimes think that they are the same.  THEY ARE NOT. A demand is straight forward and guides your action, but it does not equivocate. 

Let us be clear that, we, in the union movement made a big mistake in how we understood the November 2008 elections. Yes, we were sick of Bush. Yes, we realized how dangerous the McCain/Palin ticket was, but we made a particular mistake.  We engaged in magical and wishful thinking.

Yes, Obama was the right person to elect, but he is not a miracle maker.  He is an outstanding thinker and speaker, who is tied into corporate <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />America. He is someone who seems to have an irresistible impulse to approach matters of controversy by jumping to the middle position and believing that a consensus can be built.—rather than staking out a position that he believes in and fighting for it.

Yet in today’s political situation, there is no real bi-partisanship, and not because Obama has not tried.  The Republicans have made it clear that they want to not just cut his legs off, but hang and guillotine him at the same time!! Consider that some people are using this irrationalism as their organizing approach toward members of the military to incite a coup d’état against Obama.  Think about the allegations that Obama is a socialist despite the fact that he surrounds himself with economic advisers from Wall Street!  Added to this, Republicans are being clear that there is NOTHING that Obama says, including and not limited to THEIR own proposals, to which they will agree.

Obama seems to feel more compelled to respond to that than to pay attention to the likes of us.  His reluctance to lead the charge on behalf of working people is as much driven by his ties to corporate America as it is to something that will be very uncomfortable for many of you to hear:  his fear of being perceived by white Americans as an angry Black man.

Workers have been under attack since the early 1970s, and organized labor in many countries—not just the USA—has been unable to alter its approach as to how to respond. 

The island of Guadeloupe has an unemployment rate of 23%.  We complain—justifiably—about a 10% unemployment rate, but Guadeloupe has a rate that is depression level. Yet, in this situation in early 2009, the workers of this island, in response to continued attacks carried out a 44 day general strike against further cuts and against this economic atrocity.  And not only did they win, but they won and inspired workers in France and Greece to resist.

Here at home, our response to the economic crisis has been nothing short of anemic…at best.  When the financial collapse took place in the fall of 2008, organized labor did almost nothing. Organized labor basically kept this within the Beltway and made little effort to connect this to the issues that working people face every day; in other words they did not connect EFCA to economic justice. They AND WE have waited for the person who many people have come to believe to be the greatest magician—President Obama—to resolve everything.  Change does not come from one person, or patiently requesting change. 

We have to realize that elected leaders are bombarded by various forces, and particularly forces that have far more money and other resources than do we.  This, then, goes beyond the matter of good intentions, good speeches, and good looks.  It goes to matters of power…who has it…who wants it…and how it is used.

So, the fact that the Obama administration has not delivered many of the changes that we have requested, there has been both anger and despair, but what there has been so little of…particularly from unions and pro-worker/pro-community organizations…has been a mobilization to insist upon our demands.

We must make our so-called friends do the right thing. This is not personal.  This is about power.  And it is about taking on those whose legs wobble in the face of the goliath of corporate America.  This is about saying to our so-called friends that we are not interested in being taken for granted. We are prepared not to rest easy or quietly.  We will be heard. We are not interested in being the shock troops for change, only to sit back and see our hopes evaporate.

We cannot let the obstructionism of the Republicans, or the complacency of the Democrats, get in our way. We must let no one, and I mean NO ONE, turn us around.

It is now up to us to seize the time and realize the hope that was expressed in the 2008 elections.  Despair has no place in our present or our future.  It never has…and never will

Thank you.

Working people across America welcome the news that the Senate has passed a jobs bill today as a first step to put Main Street back to work. Senator Reid has said more actions need to be—and will be—taken. We couldn’t agree more. We need much bigger and bolder actions to ensure that we create 10 million jobs and Wall Street pays the bill to fix the financial disaster.

In a turn of head spinning hypocrisy, some Republican Senators had the audacity to vote for a bill they voted less than 48 hours ago not to allow even to be considered. If these Senators want to be seen as part of the solution, they must stop these procedural hijinks that are slowing down the Senate and hurting the recovery. Working families need jobs and are demanding real results from Washington.

Moving forward, we will be taking the fight for jobs to communities nationwide, focusing on the solutions we have outlined in our 5 point jobs plan: Extending unemployment insurance benefits, food assistance and health benefits; rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and investing in green jobs; increasing aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services; increasing funding for neglected communities to match people who want to work with jobs that need to be done; and using TARP money to get credit flowing to small businesses.

The idea behind Black History Month is the “reaffirmation of struggle and determination to change attitudes and heighten the understanding of the African experience.”  The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) shares in that reaffirmation.  Not only do we  share in the struggle for the understanding of the minority experience, but also in the equality and fair treatment on the workplace of federal and D.C. government workers.

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A Part of History: NVP <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Augusta Thomas Recalls her Involvement in the Civil Rights Sit-Ins

On February 11, 1960, Augusta Y. Thomas and her sister drove to Louisville, KY, to participate in a sit-in that had started in Greensboro, NC. Thomas and her sister were joined by several other African Americans who lived in Louisville and promptly sat down at the first whites-only counter they could find and be served. “Well, they didn’t like that. So they spit on us and knocked us off our stools. And because me and my sister were so fair skinned and sometimes mistaken for white, we were mocked for supporting the ‘negroes.’”

The physical violence against Thomas and her sister was only the beginning. They were eventually arrested and locked up on February 14 for more than five hours. That did not deter them. As soon as they were released, Thomas and her sister went back to that same counter on February 15 and sat back down. Although they were spat on, kicked and knocked off the stools for a second day, Thomas and her sister never said anything to their attackers. They knew that it was better to say nothing at all because “when you do say something, the violence will only get worse.”

On the 16th of February, they got locked up again. Upon release, Thomas called her father who said she needed to come home to take care of her family. At the time, Thomas had six children and her sister had three. “My father was very supportive of what we were trying to do,” said Thomas. “But he felt that enough was enough. If I had not had six children, I would have remained in Louisville for several days. This cause was greater than me.”

When asked what she took away from the experience Thomas replied, “If you persist you will win. You don’t have to be nasty or rude…just keep being persistent and pray.”

Thomas felt as though what they were doing would eventually pay off and that the Greensboro sit-ins set an example for the rest of the civil rights movement. “I felt that if we sat long enough then others would understand what we were doing, and eventually the mistreatment would cease. The young men and women in the movement would take turns doing the sit-ins and every evening we would meet at the church to express our feelings about it. It’s something we just did,” Thomas concluded. “It’s like we knew in our hearts that it was something we just had to do.”

The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement

Then & Now: Washington, D.C. Government

In 1940, segregation in Washington, D.C., was not much different from many other places in America. African Americans held the menial jobs while whites had access to the professional and managerial jobs. Schools were still segregated, as were restaurants. African American women cleaned the homes of white people and took care of their children, worked at laundries and if they managed to land a job in one of the spectacular federal office buildings worked as secretaries and janitors. Yet AFGE Local 383, founded by African Americans at the Industrial Home School in Blue Plains, was already three years old in 1940 and an active part of the union.

In 2008, segregation is illegal, yet the large majority of janitors, street cleaners and other service workers who keep the city running are still people of color. Today the people they provide services for are a mix of African American, white and foreign-born. More men and women of all races and ethnic backgrounds have risen to the ranks of management, and African American and Latino senators and representatives can be seen walking the halls of Congress. And today, D.C. workers enjoy union wages and benefits and the right to speak up for their interests collectively to the city council because D.C. has partial home rule, an elected government and its own employees. Members of Local 383 include social workers, paramedics, and other professionals of all races. 

Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis. . .

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing i! ncoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulati ons of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostl y negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state's bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya's), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

The polit! icians thriving at the moment are the ones who embody this live-for-the-today mentality, those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face. Take Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts. Brown wants government to take in less revenue: He has signed a no-new-taxes pledge and called for an across-the-board tax cut on families and businesses. But Brown doesn't want government to spend any less money: He opposes reductions in Medicare payments and all other spending cuts of any significance. He says we can lower deficits above 10 percent of GDP—the largest deficits since World War II, deficits so large that they threaten our future as the world's leading military and economic power—simply by cutting government waste. No sensible person who has spent five minutes looking at the budget thinks that's remotely possible. The charitable interpretation is that Brown embodies naive optimis! m, an approach to politics that Ronald Reagan left as one of his more dubious legacies to Republican Party. A better explanation is that Brown is consciously pandering to the public's ignorance and illusions the same way the rest of his Republican colleagues are.

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myth! s about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. Our reluctance to recognize economic choices also portends negative effects for the rest of the world. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.

Many Americans look forward to Martin Luther King Jr. Day (MLK) because it means we get a three day weekend–a little reprieve from the office in the post-holiday January doldrums. But we must never forget the true meaning of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in that we should reflect on all that Dr. King stood for and remember and celebrate the courage and audacity of those who fought for civil rights.

This week, the AFL-CIO will hold its annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration activities in Greensboro, NC, for five days of activities, including community service projects, a jobs town hall meeting and workshops and commemoration of the 50th anniversary of one of the most important demonstrations in the civil rights movement, of which AFGE National Vice President for Women and Fair Practices Augusta Y. Thomas participated. AFGE Communications Intern Courtney Johnson interviewed NVP Thomas on her experiences with the sit-in, which started in Greensboro on February 1, 1960, and spread throughout the South during the following weeks. . .

On February 11, 1960, Augusta Y. Thomas and her sister drove to Louisville, KY, to participate in a sit-in that had started in Greensboro, NC. Thomas and her sister were joined by several other African Americans who lived in Louisville and promptly sat down at the first whites-only counter they could find and be served. “Well, they didn’t like that. So they spit on us and knocked us off our stools. And because me and my sister were so fair skinned and sometimes mistaken for white, we were mocked for supporting the ‘negroes.’”

The physical violence against Thomas and her sister was only the beginning. They were eventually arrested and locked up on February 14 for more than five hours. That did not deter them. As soon as they were released, Thomas and her sister went back to that same counter on February 15 and sat back down. Although they were spat on, kicked and knocked off the stools for a second day, Thomas and her sister never said anything to their attackers. They knew that it was better to say nothing at all because “when you do say something, the violence will only get worse.”

On the 16th of February, they got locked up again. Upon release, Thomas called her father who said she needed to come home to take care of her family. At the time, Thomas had six children and her sister had three. “My father was very supportive of what we were trying to do,” said Thomas. “But he felt that enough was enough. If I had not had six children, I would have remained in Louisville for several days. This cause was greater than me.”

When asked what she took away from the experience Thomas replied, “If you persist you will win. You don’t have to be nasty or rude…just keep being persistent and pray.”

Thomas felt as though what they were doing would eventually pay off and that the Greensboro sit-ins set an example for the rest of the civil rights movement. “I felt that if we sat long enough then others would understand what we were doing, and eventually the mistreatment would cease. The young men and women in the movement would take turns doing the sit-ins and every evening we would meet at the church to express our feelings about it. It’s something we just did,” Thomas concluded. “It’s like we knew in our hearts that it was something we just had to do.”

The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement

Good morning and thank you, Donna (Lienwand).  I am delighted to be here at the National Press Club.  I want to thank the officers of the Press Club for the invitation to be with you today, especially President Lienwand and speakers’ committee member Bob Carden.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Ten days into the new decade, and one year into the Obama Administration, our nation remains poised between the failed policies of the past and our hopes for a better future.  This is a moment that cries out for political courage – but it is not much in evidence.

I spent the first week of this year traveling on the west coast.  In <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />San Francisco, I was arrested with low-wage hotel workers fighting to protect their health care and pensions from leveraged buyouts gone bad.  In Los Angeles and San Diego, I talked with working Americans moved to tears by foreclosure and unemployment, outsourcing and benefit cuts. 

Everywhere I went, people asked me, why do so many of the people we elect seem to care only about Wall Street?  Why is helping banks a matter of urgency, but unemployment is something we just have to live with?  Why don’t we make anything in America anymore?  And why is it so  hard to pass a health care bill that guarantees Americans healthy lives  instead of guaranteeing insurance companies healthy profits? 

As I travelled from city to city, I heard a new sense of resignation from middle class Americans, people laid off for the first time in their lives asking, “What did I do wrong?”       

I came away shaken by the sense that the very things that make America great are in danger.  What makes us unique among nations is this:  In America, working people are the middle class.  We built our middle class in the 20th century through hard work, struggle and visionary political leadership.  But a generation of destructive, greed-driven economic policies has eroded that progress and now threatens our very identity as a nation. 

Today, on every coast and in between, working women and men are fighting to join the middle class and to protect and rebuild it.  We crave political leadership ready to fight for the kind of America we want to leave to our children and against the forces of greed that brought us to this moment.  But instead we hear a resurgence of complacency and political paralysis.  Too many people in Washington seem to think that now that we have bailed out the banks, everything will be okay.

In 2010, our elected leaders must choose between continuing the policies of the past or striking out on a new economic course for America—a course that will reverse the damaging trend toward greater inequality that is crippling our nation.

At this moment, the voices of America’s working women and men must be  heard in Washington—not the voices of bankers and speculators for whom  it always seems to be the best of times, but the voices of those for  whom the New Year brings pink slips and givebacks, hollowed-out health  care, foreclosures and pension freezes– the roll call of an economy  that long ago stopped working for most of us.

Today, I want to talk to you about the labor movement’s vision for our nation. 

Working people want an American economy that works for them—that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly shared, and where the economic life of our nation is about solving problems like the threat of climate change rather than creating problems like the foreclosure crisis.  We know that growing inequality undermines our ability to grow as a nation – by squandering the talents and the contributions of our people and consigning entire communities to stagnation and failure. 

If we are going to make our vision real, we must challenge our political leaders, and we must also challenge ourselves and our movement. 

Workers formed the labor movement as an expression of our lives— a chain of responsibility and solidarity, making millions of people here in America and around the world into agents of social change – able to  accomplish much more together than as isolated individuals.  That movement gives voice to the hopes, values and interests of working people every day.  But despite our best efforts, we have endured a generation of stagnant wages and collapsing benefits—a generation where  the labor movement has been much more about defense than about offense,  where our horizons are shrinking rather than growing.     

But the future of the labor movement depends on moving forward—on innovating and changing the way we work, on being open to all working people and giving voice to all workers, even when our laws and employers seek to divide us from each other.  And that is something we are working on every day. 

The AFL-CIO is building new ways for working people to organize themselves, and new models for collective bargaining.  We have created Working America, a 3 million member community-based union growing in working class neighborhoods—that is one of the signal accomplishments of my predecessor John Sweeney, who I’m so happy is here today.   

We are very proud of our alliance with the workers’ center movement that links the unions of the AFL-CIO with hundreds of grassroots organizations.  We are also working with community allies to strengthen the voice and bargaining power of low-wage workers in Los Angeles’ car  washes – some of the worst-paid and worst-treated workers in this country.

Next week, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker will lead  the labor movement’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the lunch  counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina – continuing the great  work she has done over so many years on behalf of the most vulnerable  in our society.  Not far from Greensboro, we have been working with  unemployed African American day laborers and their workers’ center,  desperately trying to keep alive the dream launched in those sit-ins.

In San Diego last week, I visited a pre-apprenticeship program formed by the local labor movement to create career paths for at-risk youth.  In Los Angeles, I saw a remarkable community-based labor-management training program created by the Electrical Workers that is focused on green jobs.  These programs demonstrate the tremendous benefits that are possible when labor and business come together to solve problems jointly.

I met people who had been homeless who were about to become journeymen electricians.  A young man named Nakayah said to me, “The union gave me a chance to go from no life to the hope for a middle-class life.  It didn’t just teach me to get a job. It taught me how to be a man.”

As I talked to hotel workers—members of Unite Here, many of them immigrants—on strike to keep hotel jobs from falling back into poverty and to union members with PhD’s fighting to prevent California’s budget catastrophe from cratering not only their jobs but the education of their state’s children, I thought of my father on strike in the coal fields when I was a boy.  And I was reminded of this basic truth:  A job is a good job because workers fight to make it one—it doesn’t matter if the job is in a coal mine or a classroom or a car wash.  And that’s why unions are needed today, more than ever.  

I grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania, and I was surrounded by the legacy of my parents and grandparents.  My grandfather and my father and their fellow workers went into mines that were death traps, to work for wages that weren’t enough to buy food and clothes for their families.  They and the union they built made those jobs into middle class jobs.  When I went into the mine, it was a good job.  A good job  meant possibilities for me—possibilities that my mother moved heaven  and earth to make real—that took me to Penn State and to law school and  to this podium. 

What is our legacy—the legacy of those of us who are shaping the world our children and grandchildren will inhabit?  Is our government laying the foundations young people need?  Do workplaces offer hope?  Do they even offer work?  Are we building a world we will be proud to hand over to our children?  Are the voices of the young, of the future, being heard?

In September, I was elected President of the AFL-CIO together with Secretary Treasurer Liz Shuler and Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, both of whom are here today.  Liz Shuler is the youngest principal officer of the AFL-CIO in our history, and I asked her to lead a program of outreach to young workers.  As part of that effort, the AFL-CIO conducted a study of young adults between the ages of 18 and 34, comparing their economic standing, attitudes and hopes with those from a similar survey conducted 10 years ago.  The findings are shocking.  They reveal a lost decade for young workers in America.  Lower wages.  Education deferred.  Things are so bad that one in three of these 18–34-year-olds is currently living at home with their parents. 

The desperation I heard in this survey and in the voices of proud, hard-working Americans fills me with an enormous sense of urgency, an urgency that should be shared by every elected official here in Washington and across this country.

As a country and a movement, our challenge is to build a new economy that can restore working people’s expectations and hope.  If you were laid off because of what Wall Street did to our economy, it’s not your fault.  A dead end job with no benefits is not the best our country can do for its citizens. 

What went wrong with our economy?  You could say it is as simple as we built a low-wage, high consumption economy and tried to bridge the contradiction with debt.  And there’s a lot of truth in that simplicity.  But if we are going to understand what is wrong in a way that will help us understand how to fix it, we need a little more detail.

A generation ago, our nation’s policymakers embarked on a campaign of radical deregulation and corporate empowerment – one that celebrated private greed over public service.

The AFL-CIO warned of the dangers of that path -- trade policies that rewarded and accelerated outsourcing, financial deregulation designed to promote speculation and the dismantling of our pension and health care systems.  We warned that the middle class could not survive in such an economy, that growing inequality would inevitably shrink the American pie, that we were borrowing from the rest of the world at an unsustainable pace, that busts would follow bubbles and that our country would be worse off in the end.

These policies culminated in the worst economic decade in living memory—we suffered a net loss of jobs, the housing market collapsed, real wages fell and more children fell into poverty.  And the enormous growth in inequality during that decade yielded mediocre growth overall.  This is not a portrait of a cyclical recession, but of a nation with profound, unaddressed structural economic problems on a

long-term, downward slide.  

Our structural problems pre-date the crisis that hit in 2007 and they are not going to go away by themselves in 2010.   

First, we have underinvested in the foundations of our economy— including the transportation and communications infrastructure that are essential to a middle-class society and a dynamic, competitive high-wage economy.   But the most important foundation of our economy is education and training.  We simply cannot continue to skimp on the quality of education we provide to all of our children and expect to lead in the global economy.  Likewise, we need to provide opportunities for lifelong skills upgrading to workers – through both private and public sector initiatives. 

Second, we have failed over a long period of time to create enough good jobs at home to maintain our middle class – and we have allowed corporate hacks to whittle away at workers’ bargaining power to undermine the quality of the remaining jobs. 

Finally, the structural absence of good jobs means a shortage of sustainable demand to drive our economy.

We want an entirely different kind of economy. Let’s talk about what we need to do. 

We must directly and immediately take on what is wrong— by creating millions of good jobs now, rebuilding our economic foundations and giving working people the freedom to form a union again and make all our jobs good jobs.

We must pass genuine health care reform and reregulate our financial system—so that finance is the servant of the real economy, and not its  master; so that we have an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency; and so that we never again take the public’s money and use it to rescue bank executives and stockholders.  I’d like to commend President Obama’s leadership in insisting on a viable, strong and independent consumer protection agency – which is crucial to real financial reform.

The AFL-CIO’s five-point program will create more than 4 million jobs— extending unemployment benefits, including COBRA; expanding federal infrastructure and green jobs investments; dramatically increasing federal aid to state and local governments facing fiscal disaster; direct job creation where feasible; and finally, direct lending of TARP money to small and medium sized businesses that can’t get credit because of the financial crisis. 

And we need to adopt a tax on financial speculation so that we can fund the jobs effort as the economy recovers. 

Some in Washington say when it comes to jobs: Go slow—take half steps.   These voices are harming millions of unemployed Americans and their families -- but they are also jeopardizing our economic recovery.  It is responsible to have a plan for paying for job creation over time.   But it is bad economics and suicidal politics not to aggressively address the job crisis at a time of double-digit unemployment.  In fact, budget deficits over the medium and long term will be worse if we  allow the economy to slide into long job stagnation -- unemployed  workers don’t pay taxes and they don’t go shopping; businesses without  customers don’t hire workers, they don’t invest and they also don’t pay  taxes.

Our economy does not work without good jobs, so we must take action now to restore workers’ voices in America.  The systematic silencing of American workers by denying our right to form unions is at the heart of the disappearance of good jobs in America.  We must pass the Employee Free Choice Act so that workers can have the chance to turn bad jobs into good jobs, and so we can reduce the inequality which is undermining our prospects for stable economic growth.  And we must do it now—not next year, not even this summer.  Now. 

Each of these initiatives should be rooted in a crucial alliance of the middle class and the poor.  But today, as I speak to you, something different is happening with health care. 

On the one hand we have the House bill, which asks the small part of our country that has prospered in the last decade—the richest of the rich—to pay a little bit more in taxes so that most Americans can have  health insurance.  And the House bill reins in the power of health insurers and employers by having an employer mandate and a strong public option.   

But thanks to the Senate rules, the appalling irresponsibility of the Senate Republicans and the power of the wealthy among some Democrats, the Senate bill instead drives a wedge between the middle class and the poor.  The bill rightly seeks to ensure that most Americans have health insurance.  But instead of taxing the rich, the Senate bill taxes the middle class by taxing workers’ health plans—not just union members’  health care; most of the 31 million insured employees who would be hit  by the excise tax are not union members. 

The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families.  This is a policy designed to benefit elites—in this case, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at the expense of the broader public.  It’s the same tragic pattern that got us where we are today, and I can assure you the labor movement is fighting with everything we’ve got to win health care reform that is worthy of the support of  working men and women.          

These great struggles over health care, good jobs, the freedom to organize and financial reform are just the first steps. 

Beyond the short-term jobs crisis, we must have an agenda for restoring  American manufacturing—a combination of fair trade and currency policies, worker training, infrastructure investment and regional development policies targeted to help economically distressed areas.  We cannot be a prosperous middle class society in a dynamic global economy without a healthy manufacturing sector.

We must have an agenda to address the daily challenges workers face on the job – to ensure safe and healthy workplaces and family-friendly work rules.

We also need comprehensive reform of our immigration policy -- based on  shared prosperity and fairness, not cheap labor.

And we must take on the retirement crisis.  Too many employers have replaced the system of pensions we used to have with underfunded savings accounts fully exposed to everything that is wrong with Wall Street.  Today, the median balance in 401K accounts is only $27,000 – nowhere near enough to fund a secure retirement.  We need to return to a policy of employers sharing responsibility for retirement security with employees, while also bolstering and strengthening Social Security.    

President Obama campaigned on a platform of boldly taking on these challenges.  He has spoken often about the need to refound our economy on doing real things, rather than dreaming of financial pots of gold. 

He has asked Vice President Biden to lead the effort to restore the middle class.  For the first time I can recall, we have an Administration that sees manufacturing – making things here -- as central to America’s future and that speaks clearly about the positive  role for workers and their unions in that future.  President Obama has laid out an aggressive agenda for structural change and has appointed people like Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis who believe in that vision.

Of course, President Obama inherited a terrible mess from his predecessor—a journey of stolen elections, ruinous tax cuts for the rich, dishonest wars, financial scandal, government-sponsored torture, flooded cities and finally, economic collapse.

President Obama’s administration began – out of necessity and vision --  with an act of political courage—the enactment of a broad and  substantial economic recovery program.  Despite Republican opposition,  the stimulus was big enough to make a real, positive impact on our  economy, saving or creating more than a million jobs already. 

But the jobs crisis has escalated, the foreclosure crisis continues and  Wall Street appears to have returned to its old ways. This is Bonus Week on Wall Street – watch and see how much discipline they show, with  the nation watching.

Now more than ever, we need the boldness and the clarity we saw in our president during the campaign in 2008, when he outlined the scope of the economic problems facing our nation -- unencumbered by the political cross-currents weighing us down today.  One year into the Obama Administration and one year into a Congress with strong Democratic majorities, we need leadership action that matches the urgency that is felt so deeply by working people.  

Too often Washington falls into the grip of ambivalence about the fundamental purpose of government.  Is it to protect wealthy elites and gently encourage them to be more charitable?  Or is it to look after the vast majority of the American people?

Government in the interests of the majority of Americans has produced our greatest achievements.  The New Deal.  The Great Society and the Civil Rights movement -- Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage and the forty-hour work week, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.  This is what made the United States a beacon of hope in a confused and divided world.

But too many people now take for granted government’s role as protector  of Wall Street and the privileged.  They see middle-class Americans as  overpaid and underworked. They see Social Security as a problem rather  than the only piece of our retirement system that actually works.  They  feel sorry for homeless people, but fail to see the connections between  downsizing, outsourcing, inequality and homelessness.

This world view has brought Democrats nothing but disaster.  The Republican response is to offer the middle class the false hope of tax cuts.  Tax cuts end up enriching the rich and devastating the middle class by destroying the institutions like public education and Social Security that make the middle class possible. 

But no matter what I say or do, the reality is that when unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people will not stand for tokenism. 

We will not vote for politicians who think they can push a few crumbs our way and then continue the failed economic policies of the last 30 years. 

Let me be even blunter.  In 1992, workers voted for Democrats who promised action on jobs, who talked about reining in corporate greed and who promised health care reform.  Instead, we got NAFTA, an emboldened Wall Street – and not much more.  We swallowed our disappointment and worked to preserve a Democratic majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative was.  But there was no way to persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls when they couldn’t  tell the difference between the two parties.  Politicians who think  that working people have it too good – too much health care, too much  Social Security and Medicare, too much power on the job – are inviting  a repeat of 1994. 

Our country cannot afford such a repeat.

President Obama said in his inaugural address, “The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.”  Now is the time to make good on these words – for Congress, for President Obama and for the American people.

These are big challenges.  But it is long past time to take them on. 

And for those members of Congress who think maybe taking on big challenges is not their job, and who want to keep offering working people tokenism while they govern in the interests of the people who trashed our economy, I have a suggestion for how to spend your weekends. 

Go sit with the unemployed. Talk to college students looking at tuition  hikes, laid-off professors, and no jobs at graduation.  Talk to workers  whose jobs are being offshored.  Ask what these Americans think about their future.  Ask them what they think of Wall Street, of health insurance companies, of big banks.  Ask them if they want a government that is in partnership with those folks, or a government that stands up for working people.

Then think about the great promise of America and the great legacy we have inherited.  Our wealth as a nation and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of my predecessor Samuel Gompers, “more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”

This is the American future the labor movement is working for.  Our political leaders have a choice.  They can work with us for a future where the middle class is secure and growing, where inequality is on the decline and where jobs provide ladders out of poverty.  Or they can work for a future where the profits of insurance companies, speculators and outsourcers are secure.  There is no middle ground.  Working America is waiting for an answer.  We are in a “show me” kind of mood, and time is running out.

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But for this health care bill to be worthy of the support of working men and women, substantial changes must be made.  The AFL-CIO intends to fight on behalf of all working families to make those changes and win health care reform that is deserving of the name.

The absolute refusal of Republicans in the Senate to support health care reform and the hijacking of the bill by defenders of the insurance industry have brought us a Senate bill that is inadequate:  It is too kind to the insurance industry.

Genuine health care reform must bring down health costs, hold insurance  companies accountable, assure that Americans can get the health care they need and be financed fairly.

That’s why we are championing a public health insurance option:  It is  the way to break the stranglehold of the insurance industry over  consumers that has led to double digit premium increases virtually every year.

Employers must pay their fair share.

And the benefits of hard-working Americans cannot be taxed to pay for  health care reform—that’s no way to rein in insurance companies and  it’s the wrong way to pay for health care reform.

Those are the changes for which we will be fighting in the coming days.

The Senate bill does some good things:  It will provide health insurance to 30 million more Americans and provide subsidies to low income individuals and families.  Benefits will have to meet minimum standards and insurance companies will no longer be able to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions or impose lifetime or unreasonable annual limits.  The bill also includes some relief for plans with early retirees as well as delivery system reforms that may lead to lower costs over the long haul.  And Senate leaders have made a commitment to close the Medicare prescription drugs donut hole which is so costly to seniors.

But because it bends toward the insurance industry, the Senate bill will not check costs in the short term, and its financing asks working people and the country to pay the price, even as benefits are cut.

The House bill is the model for genuine health care reform.  Working people cannot accept anything less than real reform.

"Made in America" is a phrase we all want to start hearing again, and yesterday the White House moved in that direction by unveiling a sound and thoughtful plan to help revive America’s manufacturing sector. We are pleased that President Obama is working aggressively to address this issue. We are particularly pleased by the leadership shown by Vice President Biden in this area, along with his work on behalf of middle class families. AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Liz Shuler and IBEW President Ed Hill met with the Vice President yesterday.

President Obama’s plan invests in our country by emphasizing job training, rebuilding our infrastructure, leveling the playing field in the area of trade, regulating our financial markets and, importantly, helping displaced workers who continue to struggle in the current economy.

The plan recognizes that government must play an active role in order to strengthen and restore our manufacturing sector. And it acknowledges that losses on the order of the 5 million manufacturing jobs lost in the last 10 years and our $840 billion trade deficit cannot be sustained.

Major challenges remain. A framework on manufacturing must also address currency manipulation by our trading partners and the skyrocketing costs of health care for manufacturers. These issues keep America’s manufacturers at a disadvantage. In addition, we urge the Obama administration to call for strengthening the role of workers as partners in training and workforce development. In order to do this we must restore workers’ freedom to form unions by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

We must also focus on building a workforce for the future by adequately investing in training and education for our young people, many of whom have been hit hardest by this economic crisis.

We look forward to working with the Obama Administration and with Ron Bloom, the President’s Senior Counsel for Manufacturing Policy, in order to implement these ideas. Together we can revitalize our manufacturing sector and restore the nation’s middle class.

A lot of media attention has recently been focused on the Guantanamo Detainee Issue.  Most of the  emphasis has been related to whether these detainee’s should be held on foreign soil or in America.  The debate and battle between our legislators as well as the media on this issue has at times been very heated!  I personally do not view their sideshow political antics as a platform or debate that we, the Council of Prison Locals should engage into.

Many times this type of issue swings over to the Union spectrum on a request from a Legislator to a Union in order to add support to their opinion in their state in order to try an garner favorable public opinion towards their specific initiative, which sometimes only effects their state and constituents in which they represent.  Not our mission or membership as a whole.

As Bureau of Prison employee’s it is our duty and service to ensure we protect society by confining offenders in a  controlled environment in our prisons that are safe, humane, and appropriately secure.

I believe that our staff in the Bureau of Prisons can handle any mission that they are duly authorized to perform by the Attorney General which are provided by Law and Departmental Regulation.

As a Union our position is simple.  It is a known fact that assault rates on staff are increasing at a greater rate then anytime ever in the history of the Bureau of Prisons.  It is a known fact that our prison population institution to institution Bureau-Wide is over its individual rated capacity then anytime ever in the recorded history of the Bureau of Prisons.  It is a known fact that our staff to inmate ratio’s has declined to the most current alarming rate experienced in the Bureau of Prisons which has greatly diminished our ability to provide maximum supervision to our inmate population, lower the inherent hazards of our employee’s safety when performing their duties, and maintaining public safety!

It is a fact that our Federal Prison System is underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded. The risk that have been taken no matter who is responsible for the dire situation we, the employee’s, find ourselves in on a daily basis, needs to be immediately corrected before another employee plays the ultimate price of life or is seriously injured due to inaction to implement sound funding strategies. 

Before our legislators and/or administrator’s on all levels of government  make a decision to take on a new mission, it is incumbent upon them to responsibly and pro-actively examine our current underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded state of affairs. 

I solicit each and every union member to take action. For more information, please visit www.cpl33.info. We cannot continue to operate safe prisons without increased staffing levels to meet the needs of supervising an ever increasing inmate population.  United we can get our voice heard! 

Now that Senate Democrats on Saturday voted to open up debate on health care reformworking families around the nation are keeping up the heat for the Senate to pass the bill, which includes a public insurance option. The union movement also is pushing to improve it, urging lawmakers to eliminate any tax on working families’ benefits.

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