AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler delivered the following remarks as prepared at the ProgressNow Commference:
Good afternoon, everybody!
Thank you so much Alissa, for that introduction, and for all that you and our AFSCME family have done to stand up for working people in this moment! Thank you to Anna [Scholl] and your team, for your leadership and bringing us together in this critical moment.
As Brian said: I’m Liz Shuler, President of the AFL-CIO. We are America’s unions. We’re excited to be here with so many incredible communicators from across this coalition.
And what I hope I can bring today is some perspective from not just our 63 unions, our 15 million members but working people all over the country.
One of the great joys of my job is that I get to go around, almost every day of the year, and talk to workers in every sector of our economy.
As communicators one of the toughest things we have to do is cut through the noise, isn’t it?
It can be the lies, the misinformation that’s coming out of this Administration.
It can be the different voices we hear on TV, in the media — hot takes, or just conflicting points of view.
But the single best thing about spending your days, talking to working people is that it helps you cut through that noise. It helps clarify what unites us, in a moment where everyone talks about how divided we are.
And so what I thought I’d do, is just tell you three stories this afternoon. Three stories that to me sum up the best lessons we have as a labor movement — on how we can bring people together, and build a better future for all of us.
One story is about motivation. One story is about message. And one is about a movement — about how to actually drive the change we need right now.
The first story happened just a few weeks ago, when I was in Charlotte, North Carolina.
At the very start of this Administration, when we heard Elon Musk was going to get his own Department and have a hugely outsized voice in how our government worked, we decided to do something about it.
We created our own Department — the Department of People Who Work for a Living — to help working people understand what’s happening and why it matters and speak out about the impacts.
And when Congress went on recess in April, we took that as our cue to really get going.
We set up events all over the country as representatives went home: town halls, and what we called ‘hearings.’ Places like Warner Robbins outside Macon, Georgia and Asheville, North Carolina; places our politicians don’t often go to, that aren’t red or blue strongholds. We set them up with a very simple idea. If you have a story, if you’ve been affected by what’s gone on, join us tonight. We want to hear from you.
Over two weeks thousands of Americans showed up. Not just Democrats. Not just activists. People from every walk of life.
And so as I stood there at our hearing in Charlotte, I watched person after person come up to the microphone and tell their story. Talk about how what’s happening had changed their life and their community.
Shawn Montgomery, an airport worker who said ‘I’m going to work scared every day that my livelihood, my ability to provide for my family, is going to disappear.’
Jacqueline Sandle, a retired letter carrier, who’d seen the attacks on the Postal Service and said ‘I’m watching them come for not just my own Social Security, my own dignity but the jobs and services my friends, my neighbors count on.’
A nurse, Lori Hendricks, who walked up and said: ‘I can’t tell you how many of my patients rely on Medicaid. How many lives are going to be devastated — because people suddenly can’t afford the care they need.’
When you really listen to workers all over the country talk like that, all the noise and the complexity fades away. The cynicism about how divided this country is — that fades away, too.
Because it becomes so clear — there is a common-sense agenda that unites the vast majority of this country right now.
And the way we rally people around that agenda is by relentlessly talking about the issues that matter to working people and working families.
The 9 in 10 Americans who say they’re worried about the cost of living.
The 60 million Americans who say they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck.
The two-thirds of Americans who say: yes, I want the right to join a union — so I can address those issues, and stand up for myself, and provide a better life for myself and my family.
When we talk about those issues, every single hour of the day, we are bringing people into this coalition. We are cutting through the noise in a way that only we can.
The second story is about a tweet.
On September 10 last year, I’m going to guess everyone in this room, myself included, was glued to the TV watching Donald Trump debate Vice President Harris. I won’t make any of us fully relive it.
But what I do remember — and I’m sure you all do, too — is the barrage of lies, the abhorrent language, the ridiculous attacks we heard from Donald Trump about immigrants in our country.
And so as we were hearing those, you’d go on social media and you’d see these debates happening about eating cats and dogs — which is exactly what they wanted, right?
To create this absurd debate and then demand that everyone else be part of it, demeaning our fellow Americans and our fellow human beings in the process.
So we did something a little bit different.
We tweeted one line: An immigrant doesn’t stand between you and a good job. A billionaire does.
Right now there are politicians out there, corporate leaders, higher-ed institutions, people on what is often considered ‘our side’ of the aisle who think they’re going to win points by throwing people under the bus.
By turning their backs on immigrants, on vulnerable communities, and of course our queer and trans siblings as well.
And I can’t tell you how angry it makes me to see those people go on TV, or tweet about it, and say: That’s the path forward.
No. The path forward is to build the biggest coalition possible to stand in solidarity with each other as working people and call out our real enemies.
The path forward is to take the fight to the real forces that are standing between every working-class person in America, and the life of dignity they deserve.
So we tweeted that line.
It got a lot of traction — mostly positive. But I’ll tell you what I liked most was the replies from people disagreeing with us. People who were saying, No, you’re wrong, it’s great that billionaires have blessed us with jobs. How lucky we should all feel — we should be thanking them every day.
You know what I think of those tweets? GOOD. Because now we’re in a debate about the real problem. Not the immigrant, who comes here looking for a good job and a chance to provide for their family — the exact same way every working person in this country does. But billionaires and CEOs who make 268 times what the average worker makes and leave us fighting over the scraps.
Billionaires who take a literal chainsaw to the services that our communities depend on.
Billionaires who right this second are drawing up more trillions in more tax cuts for themselves at the expense of Medicare, our Social Security, our Medicaid.
When we’re willing to call out our real enemies, our real adversaries, the fight is on our terms. And that is a fight we can win every day of the week.
The third and final story I want to tell you today is about hope. And it’s directly connected to the first two.
I want to take you back to a few years ago to the height of the pandemic in 2020.
Down in rural Georgia to a state where only about 4-5% of workers are in unions. And a place called Fort Valley.
There are a lot of heroes in this story but I want to name three: Alex Perkins. Patrick Watkins. And Dee Thomas.
All of whom worked at Blue Bird — the second-largest bus manufacturer in the country, and really the inventor of the yellow school bus as we all know it.
So the pandemic hits. Working conditions at Blue Bird are already bad, and have been for some time.
Every worker at Blue Bird — along with every worker everywhere — expects some basic decency, compassion, changes in the way things go to keep each other safe. What they hear instead from the company is this:
Report to work like nothing is happening.
You’ll make no hazard pay, with most people locked in at $13 an hour. Unpredictable schedules. Rain pouring through the roof. Water landing on electrical boxes and sockets, computers and fans. Supervisors, they said, would speak to them as if they were children, as they built these buses by hand.
So they said to themselves: Something has to change. They started to talk about organizing; about forming a union.
They reach out to one of our incredible unions, the United Steelworkers, who they’d seen organize at a nearby tire factory in Macon, Georgia.
And the company gets wind of this and says: We’re going to do everything in our power to stop it. They start lying to the workers. Putting them in captive meetings — to talk about just how “wrong” a union would be for them. They start saying: ‘Hey, if you all unionize and have the gall to demand your basic dignity on the job, we might have to close the plant. Just fold up shop.’
Despite the fact — I might add — that they’d just gotten $40 million from the federal government to build out these electric buses!
But the ultimate move they pulled was to try to isolate these workers.
That is the ultimate scare tactic, isn’t it? To say ‘no, don’t talk to anyone else. We are going to inundate you with our messaging — while you can’t hear from anyone outside the organization, about what a union might do for your life.’
Alex, Patrick, Dee and those organizers from USW, they came up with one of the greatest communications ideas I’ve seen in a long time.
They went out to former Blue Bird workers, who had left the company, and gone to work at a new unionized job. They started having those workers record videos, direct to camera, talking to their former friends and co-workers at Blue Bird saying: A union changed my life. YES, it’s as good as it sounds.
You might have questions about it — let me answer them. Let me talk to you one-on-one, and tell you my story, so that it might inspire and help you.
That is our superpower, isn’t it?
Whether we’re in labor, or in any other part of this coalition, our stories are the one thing no one can take from us. That is the one single thing that scares the billionaires, the special interests, and the people in this Administration who are doing their bidding.
The fact that we might talk to each other, and share those stories, and see how much we have in common and then stand up and demand something better.
Blue Bird had their vote to unionize on Friday, May 12, 2023. They won. They became one of the great success stories in labor organizing in the Deep South in modern history and that story, I promise you, is going to inspire workers for decades to come.
Yes, this is a tough moment right now. There’s no doubt about it.
But I’m reminded every single day, there are real stories of hope and possibility all over this country. Working people who are fighting for themselves, for their co-workers, for their neighbors, for people they haven’t met and will never know.
It’s our job, it’s our calling right now to tell those stories. To have the courage to call out those who stand our way. And to bring people together, right now, on the very real agenda that unites us — when those in power would have us believe we’re hopelessly divided.
So I just need to know one thing: Are you all ready to tell those stories?
Are you all ready to call out those who stand in our way?
Are you all ready to bring this country together, so that every single person can live with dignity?
I am too!!! Thank you so much, ProgressNow!