Thank you!
It’s an honor to be with you all. Thank you for inviting me. It’s wonderful to speak to UNITE HERE! What a history you have, and what a future!
First, I want to tell you how much I love and admire this union. You’re a truly powerful force in America, and you know how to inspire us all, to help us persist in transforming our shared vision into reality.
I’m thinking right now about the Frontier strike that ended in 1998, which strengthened the resolve of the Culinary Workers and every worker in Las Vegas, and ushered in a new era of prosperity for working people in that incredible city. I remember that fight like it was yesterday.
I’m proud to have stood with you. We stood together on that picket line, solid, arm-in-arm, and I know we’ve got some Frontier strikers here with us today! Stand up! If you were on that picket line, stand up!
Give yourselves a hand! You lifted up a generation of Nevada workers, but it wasn’t easy. It took seven long years. It took seven years! And after seven years, working people won!
And I am so proud, so proud, I stood with you, and we stood together to make work pay.
That same spirit is right here in this room. You see, I know just as well as you do that a hard-won victory can galvanize a generation. I have no doubt that the Frontier victory inspired thousands of families, tens of thousands, and can be traced backward to wins all across this country and forward to successful and in-progress organizing drives in places like Phoenix and New Orleans and Miami, to riverboats on the Mississippi and bottom-up fights in Houston and San Antonio.
That’s unionism. And let me tell you what else is unionism: “Changing 50,000 More Lives.”
That’s a beautiful theme. That’s a forward-looking theme. That’s a winning theme.
Brothers and sisters, we’re going to change 50,000 lives for the better, and there’s just no telling all the good to come from it.
The best way to fair pay, is a union contract.
The best way to retirement security, is a union contract.
The best way to a better tomorrow, so you can give your family a decent life and health care and a good education, it all comes back to a union contract.
And a decent life is not too much to ask, because we’re the workers of America. We create the wealth. We turn on the lights and clean the rooms. We drive the trucks and make the roads. We build the bridges and bake the bread. We wake our country up every single day, and we tuck her into bed at night. We won’t be turned aside. We won’t be faced down, and we will not be denied.
Sisters and brothers, we’re building power for working people. We’re strengthening our state federations of labor and CLCs. We’re joining together with allies, in ways we never have before. We’re a mainstream movement, and we’re acting like it.
And yes, we will be campaigning hard in this electoral season. All of us will be looking closely at each candidate for local, state and federal office, this year and next year, and the year after that. We’ll ask these candidates tough, pointed questions, and we will get firm answers, solid commitments. We won’t be counting on gratitude.
You see, we don’t work for any candidate. We’re not building power for any political party. Not the Democratic Party. Not the Republican Party. We’re building power for working people, pure and simple. We’re looking at the long view.
Yet I promise, nobody will work harder to elect the leaders who make the right commitments, and nobody will work harder to defeat those who don’t, regardless of political party. We’re not going to hold our nose and endorse Democrats, just because they have a D next to their name. That’s not good enough.
Here’s why this is important. The AFL-CIO did a poll the other day about the potential electoral impact of flat wages. We asked a group of voters if they agreed with this simple statement: “We need to make sure that all of us, not just the CEOs, get our fair share in our economy.”
When we asked those making less than $50,000 a year, two out of three voters agreed, 66% said, yes, that’s right, we need to make sure all of us, not just CEOs get our fair share.
Here’s the kicker. Guess who we asked? Registered Republicans. That poll was of voters registered with the Republican Party.
Here’s what this means to me. It means working people of every stripe share the same basic challenges, and the same hopes and dreams. And that’s why we’ve started educating, mobilizing and organizing these workers on a national scale.
But we have a challenge. Working-class voters are less likely to turn out in off-year elections. So if we want the policies our working families need, if we want all of us to get our fair share, we need the right leaders in our states and for this country, we’ve got to engage and turn out our people.
And by our people, yes, I’m talking about our members and families—but also regular working people who share our basic values, our aspirations. I’m talking about our neighbors, our friends from church, our cousins and all those people you know on Facebook, everybody. All of us who feel that no matter how hard we work these days, we can’t get ahead, we need each other. We can’t get ahead alone. But we can get ahead together.
It’ll take hard work, but we have an advantage mobilizing hard-working voters—because the values and policies we stand for, are directly in our shared interest. Raising wages, protecting health care and retirement security, making workplaces safe and jobs family-friendly, and making sure this economy works for the many, not just the wealthy few.
Brothers and sisters, we have big things to do as a country—put our people back to work, raise wages, restore our democracy, and build 21st century infrastructure.
And that’s just the opener. We’re going to end the mass incarceration of a generation of our brothers, we are going to end the practice of throwing young men of color into jail for years for having a bag of weed, or other nonviolent offenses.
We can’t deny people opportunities and then, when they stumble, lock them in jail, and throw away the key.
And, let me tell you, we’re going to end the crisis of our broken immigration system. We won’t have our families torn apart. We won’t let our immigration laws be used as a hammer to beat working people. We want a workable path to citizenship for the millions and millions of immigrants in America today, and we want deportations to stop. We want them to stop now!
Right now, 1,100 people are deported every single day.
Good people, who are American in every way but on paper, good people who have committed no crime other than working to build a better life, are hounded by the authorities in a democratic society. Families are torn to pieces. That’s just wrong, and it has to stop.
Brothers and sisters, from the Vatican in Rome to the Moral Mondays in North Carolina, people want an end to the politics of cruelty, the politics of poverty, the politics of exclusion.
The time is right. The world is changing. America is changing. The power of the 99% is growing. This is the new story in America.
This new national storyline did not start in Washington, D.C. or in the centers of American power. It didn’t come from Wall Street. It has risen up from the hotels and casinos and the taxi stands and from the early bus, when the domestic workers travel across town together for a day’s work. It comes from the Facebook pages where Walmart workers meet and learn how much they have in common, and how strong they are. It comes from the college graduates trying to find jobs under crushing debt, and from those earning our terribly low, low minimum wage.
And it is up to you and me, to each of us, to help make the voices of America, our America, heard in the workplace and in our national life.
Work should never hold us down and trap us in poverty. Work must lift us up. We want our country to work for the people who work!
Power and hope are rising, sisters and brothers.
Power and hope are rising. It’s truly a groundswell, in the words of the great poet Maya Angelou, who died last month:
“Still I rise.”
“Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
“You may trod me in the very dirt…
You may trod me in the very dirt…
but still, like dust, I rise.”
We’ve got a lot of work to do between now and November, and after.
At the Washington office of the AFL-CIO this week, we’re holding a Citizenship Fair. You see, we’re helping green card holders become citizens. That’s not a new thing. UNITE HERE has had an active citizenship program for years.
You know, for 100 years, the best path for immigrants to reach the American Dream was through a union hall. It’s the same today. And more and more of us in the labor movement are catching on. That’s a good thing. It’s an example of how the American labor movement will be building power for working people at the same time as we build for electoral politics. The two will create a cycle, always building power, always growing, always reaching for a better tomorrow.
Listen, I know how hard you work. I know how dedicated you are. When it came to the Working Voice PAC two years ago, UNITE HERE stepped up with generous support, and I mean generous, and I thank you for your confidence and your leadership. Your contributions add vital strength to our political program, and I want you to know that it’s appreciated.
Working people need you again. We need your political action. We need you for legislative accountability. We need your voter registration. And we need your organizing, we need it to show working people everywhere we can stand together, in solidarity, for a better life. It works.
I know how well it works, because I see it even in so-called right-to-work states. I know of UNITE HERE hotels, in places like Phoenix, with 88% membership. That’s no accident. It’s a testament to service, it’s a testament to how solidarity changes lives.
That’s what all our work is about. It’s about changing our lives, and scrambling and reaching for a little more hope.
We have a vision. And we’re going to make it real, because all of us pitch in, that’s shared responsibility, shared sacrifice. We do what it takes.
What we want is simple. It’s what everybody wants, the chance to work hard for a decent life, for health care, for a secure retirement, and to give a better life to our kids.
We’ll stand together, because we’re stronger together.
We’ll work for it, sisters and brothers. We’ll stand for it. Together. Each of us. With solidarity. Real solidarity. Where your picket line is my picket line. And my picket line is your picket line. And we’ll stand together. Shoulder to shoulder. Arm-in-arm. All day. Every day. As long as it takes. To win together. Because we’re going to win together. Grow together. To bring out the best in ourselves, to bring out the best in America.
Thank you. Thank you, and God bless you!