My Speech at the Promoting the General Welfare Conference

This conference for the general welfare at the University of Nebraska Omaha, which my friend John Kretzschmar organizes and conducts every year, is always exciting and inspiring. They bring together some some of the best thinkers and speakers in the American labor movement to discuss the newest trends and efforts and struggles in our movement.

To hear an executive officer of color of the AFL-CIO speak about a righteous internal struggle for more diversity in all elements and all levels of the labor movement is very overdue and incredibly exhilarating. It is certainly exciting to hear about the labor movement’s new effort to broaden its base through mutual and real partnerships with other struggles, organizations, and institutions that share our values and vision for a new and different world and country.

It is critical for us to understand that our democracy is quickly being shattered by right-wing forces with more money than they can spend, unknown power which have fooled, misled, deceived, and defeated the American people.

We must understand that our democracy has been broken. Fixing our broken democracy and empowering people with a vision and values of justice, compassion, love, and self-organization is our most important struggle today.

But we cannot lose sight of the imperative of GROWTH.

Growth is the source of our power and power is the source of victory.

Victory means organizing and growth. There is no escaping that central point.

And I simply don’t see enough organizing happening.

My union, 1199, is organizing. AFSCME is organizing. SEIU is organizing. And in some places we’re doing it all together.

IBEW is working to organize.

The Ironworkers are organizing.

Steel is running some of labor’s most exciting campaigns.

But we need a strategy based on a struggle to raise the wages and living standards of America’s workers. We need to fight the filthy pigs who’ve stolen all the gains in our productivity in the last 35 years.

America’s workers are too poor and we work too hard for the gain of others–and we’re becoming more poor.

We will win as we have so many times before when all of us fight to build the power necessary to win.

Our middle class is diminishing quickly.

There is NO justification for the amount of our wealth going to the top of the top.

When our middle class has shrunk far enough, we will become a second rate country—and that is worth fighting about.

Image source: @Labor411