Read it carefully, the author starts with Trumpka's speech, then goes on her own tangent with the push against the mega-Churches.
Here is the COMPLETE Speech of April 27, 2011:
Good afternoon. It is such a pleasure to be here with all of you. I want to extend a special greeting to all the young lawyers here today. I look at you and I see myself back in 1978 as a new attorney at the Mineworkers. Thank you for choosing to be a labor lawyer, to spend your career fighting for workers—and for being part of the giant LCC law firm that the AFL-CIO is so fortunate to have as its partner.
Let me also express my heartfelt thanks to Lynn Rhinehart, our General Counsel and the leader of the Lawyers Coordinating Committee, for all she has done over the last year and a half since becoming General Counsel. The officers of the AFL-CIO rely on her and her colleagues' guidance every day, and we are grateful.
I want to speak to you today about the state of the labor movement and the state of our nation. This is an extraordinary moment, when your skills your dedication to working people are needed more than ever. In fact, many of you are probably overwhelmed by the needs of your clients and found it challenging even to make the time to be here. Other LCC colleagues—in Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida and other key states—simply couldn't get here because their legislatures are still in session and they needed to stay home to help stop any last-minute legislative attacks.
So here is how things seem to me. Our nation's economy is weak. The real unemployment rate is around 16%. Housing prices are falling and gas prices are rising—a deadly combination. Thanks to stimulus spending, the economy has gotten a little better, but not much. We face fundamental problems whose roots are wage stagnation and inequality—both tied to the weakness of the labor movement and to globalization that has no plan for maintaining the middle class. On top of that, we have failed as a nation to invest in our future—in our workforce, in our infrastructure, in technology, in the clean energy the rest of the world is moving towards—and we haven't done that because the wealthiest among us would rather have tax cuts than a future.
Since this debate is raging right now, I want to state the obvious—that the dumbest possible thing to do in a weak economy is cut government budgets, lay off hundreds of thousands of government employees and suffer through the inevitable shrinking of the economy. Yet that is exactly what we are doing. And the reason we are doing it is politics.
In a weak economy—a shrinking pie—politics gets vicious. The people who have always been vicious get more followers, and the voices of reason are drowned out. It is a time ripe for the Glenn Becks, the Scott Walkers and the culture police in Maine who think workers will be silenced by destroying our art.
It is telling that their Number One target is not President Obama, although they hate him. Their Number One target is us—working people and our unions. Why? Because working people's strength and passion for our rights, for our families and our country, our solidarity and our unions are a wall standing between the Scott Walkers and the Glenn Becks and the Koch Brothers and all the power they crave but will never, ever get in our country. Not in America.
That's what working people—and LCC members standing with them—showed in Indianapolis and Madison and Columbus, Ohio—in the streets and the statehouses and the polling booths all across our country.
You know, the right wing cabal that dreamed up the attack on public employees really thought—since they had lots more money than we did, and they had bought politicians legally with campaign contributions—that this was going to be easy. But they misunderstood who they were taking on. It wasn't anyone famous. They were taking on the people who teach our children and care for us when we grow old, the men and women who rescue us when we are in trouble, the people who clean up the parks in summer and plow the roads in the winter—the men and women who serve our country every day—and their families, their friends and every person in our country who they help.
The fact is that what brings us together—teachers and students, construction workers and health care workers, police and firefighters—is stronger than what divides us. Let me tell you that one of the best moments in this fight so far was the moment when the sheriff of Madison, Wisconsin called a press conference to say he and his deputies refused to be Scott Walker's, and I quote, "palace guard," and refused to throw the people of Wisconsin out of their state house. The solidarity of working people is a powerful thing.
Money may not win in the end, but it can certainly put up a fight. We have our work cut out for us across these states. In Wisconsin, the recall battles are on, and the state senators who voted to take away workers' rights are running scared. And in Ohio, although they passed the bill to take away our rights, the citizens' veto is underway. The fact is that today, four months into this fight, we have managed to fend off or delay almost all of the attacks on public employee collective bargaining rights, and dozens---hundreds---of other attacks.
And for that, we have to thank the courage and tenacity of working people, the ingenuity of lawyers and the integrity of judges. Because, in Madison, Wisconsin, Scott Walker and his friends in the legislature simply were not willing to hold an open vote on their anti-worker bill. They were afraid to look the teachers and health care workers in the eye and take away their rights in an open meeting. They figured that the law is meant for little people, not people of importance like themselves, and they took the vote in secret. And now, Scott Walker's bill is enjoined until he and his friends summon the courage and the support to vote it in an open meeting.
I really believe the public is on to what these CEO-backed Republican attackers are trying to do to working people and their rights, and that over the next 18 months, working people and our allies across these battleground states are going to win—not every fight, but the big ones and the day. I believe Scott Walker, the ambitious little big man that he is, will regret listening to the Koch Brothers—the real ones, not the Internet pranksters.
But the bigger question really is what does this fight mean for workers' future in America? It would be nice to say that victory over Kasich and Walker and company will mean victory for workers and our unions. But that will not be true.
The reality is that we have only faced this kind of attack because the labor movement has been in decline for so long our enemies thought we were weak and isolated and could be destroyed once and for all. The truth is that we live in a country where 3 out of 4 workers are in the private sector, and only 7% of them have a union in their workplace. That figure—7% private-sector union density—may be the most important number in American life. It speaks to stagnant wages and out-of‑ control health care costs, to mass foreclosures, to weak demand, to the politics of plutocracy, to our failure to invest in America.
It has brought us where we are, and we will not revive as a movement, will not be the voice for all workers that we must be, until far more workers in the private sector enjoy the rights to bargain and to economic security that public-sector workers are fighting for right now across our heartland. We must rededicate ourselves to organizing, and to finding creative new ways for workers to have a voice on the job if we want to be a force that cannot just withstand attacks, but can push and win a progressive agenda that benefits all working people.
I know we all share a deep disappointment over the failure of the Democrats to pass the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009 and 2010. And I want you to know we have not given up working to find and create paths to labor law reform. We will not repeat the mistake we made in the 1970s, when we lost the moment and let it go for a generation---we will not.
But I am increasingly convinced that if we want the law to change, workers must demand that change. We must remember that first there were mass strikes in cities like Seattle and Minneapolis, then the National Labor Relations Act passed. First came the mass arrests in Birmingham, Alabama, then the Civil Rights Act. First came the attack on John Lewis and the voting rights marchers on the Pettus Bridge, then the Voting Rights Act. Power yields nothing without a fight.
So we must organize now. That means experimentation. It means creating not just national corporate strategies, but global strategies. Solidarity must be as mobile as capital. It means expanding and deepening Working America, the AFL-CIO's community affiliate, and figuring out ways to broaden Working America's scope into the workplace. It means strengthening our community partnerships and alliances with worker centers and other organizing efforts among excluded workers. It means community-based campaigns like the car wash organizing effort up the road from here in LA, where the Steelworkers are working with community organizations to organize thousands of low-wage, immigrant workers with the active help of LCC members like Jay Smith and Ryan Spillers and so many others. It means looking at organizing across workplaces in communities where there is energy—in places like Wisconsin and Ohio and Indiana. You're going to be hearing more about this tomorrow from our terrific new organizing director, the former secretary-treasurer of the UAW, Elizabeth Bunn.
Millions of people have learned in these last few months how important the right to collective bargaining is if we want to be a middle-class country, and about the power of nonviolent protest. There should be consequences for taking away the right to bargain—consequences not just for politicians, but for employers, too. Employers in this country should learn that the penalty for firing a worker for organizing a union is something more than a Board charge and a posting. We should be building an army of activists across the country who are ready to protest at the workplaces of employers who deny workers' rights. Without flying squadrons, could organizing the manufacturing sector have been possible? No doubt, you will be the lawyers advising the army of activists and assisting them along the way. You might even have to defend them a time or two.
The AFL-CIO is committed to growing and broadening the labor movement and to lending our voice and our strength to the cause of democracy wherever the fight may be. And I do mean wherever.
As the protests in Wisconsin raged, union members in Washington and around the world were at Egyptian embassies, standing in solidarity with Egyptian workers on strike against the Mubarak kleptocracy. Last week the AFL-CIO filed a protest under the United States' trade agreement with Bahrain against the savage repression of the workers' movement in that country, where immigrant and Bahraini workers have stood together demanding democracy, only to be shot down in the streets by government security forces.
In the age of Internet globalization, we live our cause as one with workers around the world. The U.S. labor movement's voice has been clear in support of democracy and workers' rights in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Bahrain, in Syria, in Iran—and our voice has been heard. Victorious protestors in Egypt ordered pizza by cell phone for workers sitting-in in Madison, Wisconsin. One of the inspiring young leaders of the teaching assistants' AFT local in Madison is an Egyptian student whose family was in the streets in Cairo. We are global.
In that spirit, we are building solidarity with workers around the world employed by the same company. CWA and the German union Ver di have come together to help Deutsche Telekom workers all over the world organize, including T-Mobile workers in this country. The United Auto Workers and its counterparts worldwide in the International Metalworkers Federation are doing the same for U.S. companies globally, and foreign auto companies operating in the U.S. multinational corporations must be met by multinational solidarity.
But if the importance of unity among workers around the world has been highlighted, so has the importance of unity at home. In state after state, the entire labor movement is working together at a level of cooperation we haven't seen in years. The unions of the AFL-CIO, including the hundreds of locals with solidarity charters, and the unions that left the AFL-CIO in 2005 and remain unaffiliated, the National Education Association, the Fraternal Order of Police and other unions that have never been affiliated with the AFL-CIO—we are all working together. This solidarity is what we need to rebuild a strong and effective American labor movement. It cannot be temporary. And we cannot accept an ad hoc, cafeteria-style solidarity. There is no reason today for disunity in our movement. No issues of principle divide us, and we cannot afford division for its own sake. But we are hurt, our movement is hurt, by the absence of disaffiliated unions from our common efforts.
We need—working people need—a labor movement united in the AFL-CIO to bring us all together—not just for the numbers or organizational strength of the unions that have left us. But also, their wealth of ideas, energy and perspective. What is the AFL-CIO if not the embodiment of others' recognition long ago that apart, the AFL and the CIO were not strong enough to make enough of a difference for workers—and both sides had to change to make unity work. We're in that position again today, and I am committed to unity and to reaching out in the coming weeks and months to make it happen.
But frankly, time is short.
Why do I say that? Because we have not arrested our long downward slide. And, because the labor movement faces true existential challenges. Our foes aren't nipping at the edges of workers' rights and unions. They are waging a coordinated effort to take us out. All the way out.
The next stage of the battle, of course, is 2012.
But understand, if the results in 2012 merely extend the status quo of 2011, that is almost as much an existential threat as an electoral defeat in 2012 would be. We need a 2012 election that puts the Scott Walkers of the world on notice that their agenda is not a viable political strategy. We need to win back the House, keep the Senate and win state and local races across the country. We need to win back at least one house in every one of these embattled state legislatures. Political strategies that are simply about low-risk ways of holding the White House will not help workers—they will lengthen a losing end game and will not give us a path to victory.
To get the job done, we need to build and strengthen and broaden the labor movement. We need to better engage our members and build an army of activists like the teachers and firefighters and other public employees in Wisconsin who have inspired us all. We need to have the numbers, the organization and the strength to push our agenda and to hold employers AND politicians—and I mean both Republicans and the Democrats who have been weak friends or worse—we have to hold them all accountable when they fail to stand up for working people.
We must take the spirit that brought working people to the streets of Indianapolis and Madison and Columbus—and Tunis and Cairo—and bring it to all our nation's workplaces—and to our polling places, our state capitols and our national capitol. With this spirit of unity, of solidarity, of democracy itself, we can be unstoppable in 2011, in 2012 and in the years to come.
Because of this spirit, workers' rights and collective bargaining are in the news in a way they haven't been in decades. Young people want to learn about unions. An LCC member who teaches law told us his students now think unions are cool, for the first time since he started teaching.
And let's hear it for the 60 LCC lawyers who volunteered and held dozens of teach-ins at law schools around the April 4 "We Are One" days of solidarity! April 4 showed that the Wisconsin Moment, the Midwest Uprising, was not fleeting. It was not geographically isolated. It caught fire in the working people of America. That fire has grown. And on the days surrounding April 4—the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who gave his life for the right to organize—hundreds of thousands of working people from Lincoln, Nebraska to Puerto Rico, from California to Maine, joined together in those We Are One solidarity days.
And it's still growing. And I expect when you leave here you will fan that flame and keep it growing.
This incredible moment was created by the greed and meanness and overreaching of people who want to take away workers' rights and destroy unions. But it has presented us with an incredible opportunity.
The question is, what do we make of this moment? Will it begin a rejuvenated labor movement? Will we build upon it to build our movement? I think there's no question but that we must. And we need your help.
You, the lawyers of the labor movement, have a great part to play in the days to come, just as you have in these last few months of struggle across our heartland. And we know you will meet the challenge—as you did in Florida in 2000, as you did across our country protecting the right to vote in 2004 and 2008, and as you do every day representing working people and their unions. Your leadership, your ideas, your activism, your passion are needed now more than ever before.
Thank you for all you do—and will continue to do—to fight for workers' rights, to build the movement that we love and move this country in a better direction.
Thank you, and God bless you.
http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/prsptm/sp04272011.cfm
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