AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
Following is the complete text of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s speech to the Transport Workers Union of America’s 22nd Constitutional Convention on Tuesday, September 20, 2005. He was introduced by International President Emeritus Sonny Hall.

Thank you, Mike [O’Brien] for inviting me to be with you. I look forward to working together with you on the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO.

I am happy to be with Secretary-Treasurer John Kerrigan and Executive Vice President James Little.

Brothers and Sisters as I have told some of you before — as I was growing up in the Bronx this union had a special meaning for me and our family.

Because my father was a member of the TWU, we had food on the table, health care when we needed it, he got respect on the job, and an opportunity to use his voice in the politics of New York and the nation.

Those were hard times right after the Depression and during World War II, and we would never have made it without the TWU.

TWU Local 100 also provided me with my introduction to the labor movement because I often tagged along with my dad to union meetings at Manhattan Center, and I would sit and listen to Mike Quill with his Irish brogue. They are great memories.

Brothers and sisters, I bring you greetings from my partners at the AFL-CIO — Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka and Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson — and from our entire AFL-CIO Executive Council.

I know they join me in congratulating you on an outstanding convention — and you’re right — we have a future worth fighting for.

I want to commend your officers and delegates for fighting for that future with their support and solidarity at our AFL-CIO convention last month.

You know, there are those who say that solidarity is over-rated. But I beg to differ.

Working people have learned the hard way that the forces that try and divide us are relentless. Corporate titans and reactionary politicians conspire to limit our rights and limit our aspirations through division.

We fight against this divisiveness by joining together for a vision of a better world.

When we fight among ourselves only the bosses win.

Workers lose.

The divisions in the labor movement today are a tragedy and I don’t want to minimize that tragedy because it hurts the hopes of working people and all of us. There can be no question about that.

But we have a huge job to do and I want to keep us focused on the even bigger tragedy of what’s happening to our country, of who’s being favored and who’s being left behind.

What we saw in the Gulf Coast is just the latest example of the flawed priorities of the leadership of our country. Just the most gripping example of the lack of human solidarity.

Congressman John Lewis told us early on what was happening in New Orleans when he said, and I quote: “It’s so glaring that the great majority of people crying out for help are poor, they’re black. We’re not a Third World Country. This is an embarrassment. It’s a national disgrace.”

On Tuesday of last week, I traveled to Houston to visit with local union and community leaders and Mayor White, and to open our fourth AFL-CIO Workers Center in the region — we now have them up and running in Mississippi, Alabama, Atlanta, Dallas, San Antonio and Baton Rouge.

At our Worker Centers, survivors of Hurricane Katrina can learn about jobs, get instant access to computers and telephones, get benefits from their health plan and find basic relief — whether they are union members or not.

While I was in Houston, I visited a remarkable clinic at the Astrodome which was put up in just 19 hours by union and community volunteers and has been treating thousands of victims of the hurricane and flood without charge. I had the opportunity to visit many of the evacuees.

I also met with union volunteers at the Harris County AFL-CIO and what they are doing is remarkable — operating food banks; bringing New Orleans plumbers together with union contractors in Texas; and the teachers are hosting job fairs, running hotlines, recruiting teachers from the ranks of refugees and placing in school systems around the state. There were many TWU members among the volunteers.

One of the volunteer teachers told me she has 42 evacuees living in her home — just remarkable union members aiding their brothers and sisters.

I came away inspired. The refugees are being reclaimed and rescued by people who have opened their homes and their hearts — and I know there are many here today — and you are the pride of America.

But I also came away angry.

The old, the young, the sick, the poor people, and the black and the brown people of one of America’s great cities were abandoned by America and it is the shame of our nation.

Bob Schieffer of CBS News — who may be our nation’s most credible broadcast journalist — said, and again I quote “This was just survival of the richest. Official Washington was like a dog watching television — it saw the lights and images, but did not seem to comprehend their meaning or see any link to reality.”

But that was no dog watching television, brothers and sisters — that was George W. Bush.

The oil companies don’t need to make a killing on the backs of people using their mortgage money at the pump to keep their cars running, but those are the people George W. Bush is standing up for.

CEOs don’t need a permanent tax cut when they’re making 431 times the salary of the average worker.

But those are the people George W. Bush is standing up for.

And the rest of America has been left behind.

We’ve seen five straight years of manufacturing job losses — every week another plant closes right here in North Carolina.

Five straight years of cuts in vital public services, neglect of infrastructure repairs.

Five straight years of health care cost increases and men, women and children with no health insurance, of more families plunged into poverty.

And now in this fifth year, working families find themselves facing skyrocketing gas, heating oil and natural gas prices.

I know the members and the leaders of this union have seen this sorry spectacle up close – the undermining of Amtrak, cuts in security funding for mass transit, freight and commuter rail, the encouragement of outsourcing of aircraft maintenance to foreign bases and non-union shops in the U.S.

After five years of George W. Bush it is now clear to the world that our federal government is led by individuals who are not only anti-working family, they are unresponsive and unprepared.

We can’t count on our federal leadership to predict, prevent or rescue us from everyday catastrophes like poverty and hunger and joblessness, much less monumental catastrophes like killer hurricanes or, God forbid, terrorist attacks.

But the presidential administration that was unprepared to respond to Hurricane Katrina is moving with astonishing speed to use this human crisis to push an anti-worker, right wing agenda that it has been unable to move otherwise.

The floodwaters had barely begun to recede when President Bush took wage protections away from construction workers who will rebuild the Gulf Coast.

The administration already has awarded no-bid relief and recovery contracts to companies with strong ties to Bush and the Republican party.

It has also removed affirmative action requirements for contractors and weakened preferences for small and minority-owned businesses.

Bush allies are crafting plans to push vouchers for private schools -- a long-time ultra-conservative goal – as the way to get displaced students back into classrooms.

They’re pandering to anti-government ideologues by cooking up a mix of vouchers and tax breaks as the answer to health care coverage for hurricane survivors.

They’re even trying to use Katrina to justify privatizing Social Security. A Bush spokesman recently said the high cost of the hurricane's impact means we will have to “change Social Security, which threatens to strain the budget in coming years.”

Rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina will require government action on a huge scale, but we can’t give in to political profiteering.

What we are about to see in the Gulf Coast communities are corporate pigs feeding at the public trough.

Working families and poor families being exploited and victimized all over again.

And so we’re demanding that Congress reverse Bush’s Davis-Bacon suspension and take control of the rebuilding efforts.

Brothers and sisters, I’m so proud that the leaders of our movement were on the job after Katrina hit while Mr. Bush was sitting on his butt. And I’m proud that the great labor federation I’m so honored to serve could move quickly into action even though we are being buffeted by storms of our own.

AFL-CIO unions immediately began recruiting rank and file union members from across the country to help people in the ravaged areas — first-responder locals from around the country began sending in police officers, firefighters, paramedics and Haz-mat specialists to help their brothers and sisters who are struggling with search-and-rescue, flooding and fires.

The AFT dispatched staff to organize help from teachers. Delegates to the CWA convention in Chicago last month voted to send up to $4 million in relief aid to help their members in the area. The Painters have already raised $2 million from their members. Dozens of unions have set up relief funds to help their members, our state federations and central labor councils and local unions everywhere are hosting refugees, and I know that the members of this great union have been out there with everything you’ve got. Thank you.

To help provide immediate relief, the AFL-CIO created a Union Community Hurricane Relief Fund so that union members can donate online by visiting our AFL-CIO website – AFLCIO.ORG/HURRICANE.

Let me urge each and every one of you to dig deep and make a contribution so that union members and union retirees in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama can have a fighting chance to get back on their feet.

We set up the AFL-CIO fund just two weeks ago and contributions already exceed $340,000 to meet the immediate urgent needs of people who need so much help, and we’re going for a goal of $500,000 this week.

I think our response to Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that the AFL-CIO is alive and well and working despite the defections we’ve suffered.

At our AFL-CIO convention, we made some of the biggest and most important changes in our history to strengthen our movement – to move more resources into organizing. We need every union to do much, much more to invest in helping workers get the unions they need.

We took action to put real teeth into our initiatives to create more diversity in our leadership.

And to deepen our commitment to the struggles of workers around the world.

We’ve decided to expand our new community affiliate, Working America, to 2 million members by 2006 and we’re replacing our election-cycle political model with a permanent year-in and year-out mobilization capability.

Our political enemies never take a timeout and from now on – with the help of the T.W.U. and the great job you do – neither will we.

We are also determined to change the rules of politics in our country by demanding that all office holders we support in turn support working families, and the freedom of every worker to join a union and bargain collectively, and the ones who betray us will no longer be with us.

Brothers and sisters, we’re going to do everything we can to bring our movement back together, and we’re making the changes we must make in order to help affiliates organize and bargain and help workers demand a fair share of the wealth being created in our new global economy.

But we can’t stop to agonize because we have to organize.

We’re challenging international unions to put more resources into organizing and into political mobilization.

The twin lenses of Iraq and Katrina have given American workers and American voters a clear look at what President Bush and his corporate cohorts have done to our country — and they don’t like what they see.

We have more workers than ever who say they want to join unions — 57 million to be exact — and TWU proved in your successful campaign against AMFA at American Airlines that workers want to join AFL-CIO unions.

We also have more voters from working families who say they are disgusted with the direction of our country and I believe the ingredients are there for a resurgence in union organizing as well as a turnaround in our corporate-controlled national priorities.

Brothers and sisters, we do have a “future that’s worth fighting for” and I am more convinced than ever that if we put our heads and our hands and our hearts together we can make this a different country, because our power comes from people – people joined together for each other, and to paraphrase an old labor song there simply is no power greater.

Thank you and God bless you and your families and God bless America.

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