Thank you for your kind words of introduction. It’s good to be in Japan. I want to give special thanks to Brother Koga, the secretary-general of RENGO and to all the brothers and sisters of RENGO for your partnership with the AFL-CIO.
Our national labor movements are cooperating more closely all the time, and we all acknowledge how important it is for us to continue working together to increase the strength of working people all over the world.
This visit to Japan is part of that effort, so once again, I want to express my thanks to RENGO and Koga-san for hosting me. The deep friendship between RENGO and the AFL-CIO is critical. As labor leaders, we have a big job to do, all of us. We need to reverse the world-wide trend of rising inequality. To do so, we must build unity among all working people and assert that unity for shared prosperity and rising wages for all.
As some of you may know, next year in the United States, we will be holding presidential elections. Our election cycle has already started, and the campaigns will likely end up costing billions of dollars. One major goal of the U.S. labor movement is to put the interests of and the issues faced by working people and our families front and center as the presidential campaigns unfold. We have a full agenda, but it all comes back to one simple idea: Working people need wages to rise.
Last week, I gave a speech on presidential politics in an effort to move the national political conversation back in line with the basic interests of working people, all of us, from the working poor to the middle class.
In that speech, I explained how we will judge candidates for the presidency in 2016. We’ll use a simple standard. Either they stand behind policies to help working families regain our lost wages and grow our pay, or they don’t. We’re not interested in those who say nice things but fail us when it counts. We’re not interested in cautious half-measures. We want to bargain collectively without apology. We want public investment in the public good. We want student debt relief. We want to tax Wall Street for America’s priorities. We want equal pay for women. We want solutions.
Any candidate who wants to appeal to workers in the coming elections in America must put forth a bold and comprehensive Raising Wages agenda. Candidates must be committed to investing in a prosperous future for all working people. You see, it’s not just the working poor who are falling behind anymore. It’s the middle class as well. It’s everybody who counts on a paycheck to live.
So like I said, last week we laid down a standard. For working families in the United States, it is the standard. We will use that standard both to judge candidates and policies and to organize and mobilize in the community, in the workplace and in politics.
Whatever we do, wherever we live, all of us, want our work to lift us up. We all want to build a better life for ourselves and our families. In Japan and in the United States and indeed all over the world, we’re pushing for stronger national wages and against the growing use of temporary and part-time jobs as a business strategy to undermine unions and working people.
It’s an uphill battle. Since the 1980s, the growing political power of the wealthiest people in America has rewritten my country’s labor laws, trade laws, tax laws, monetary policies, fiscal policies and financial regulations, all to push wages down and to increase corporate profits, to put speculation over private investment and tax cuts over public investment.
The results: Runaway inequality. Unemployment. Falling wages. Rising economic insecurity, collapsing infrastructure. Deteriorating national competitiveness. All driven by gigantic imbalances in economic and political power.
One simple comparison captures the whole story: since 1978, U.S. CEOs have increased their own pay by almost 1,000 percent. In the same 37 years, the wages of 90% of us have gone down. That is a violation of the American Promise. And women are disproportionately impacted, earning only 78 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts with the same experience and education.
Today, right-wing politicians and anti-union employers are trying to take the worst ideas from American politics and industrial relations and export them to places like Europe and Japan.
Our collective voice, the voice of working people, is the best and strongest defense against this anti-worker agenda, both here and in the United States. And I pledge to stand with you, so we can raise our voices together to lift all of us up.
All of us stand at a crossroads. On one hand, for instance, in America, we see a tremendous and popular movement to raise wages. On the other hand is a well-funded corporate campaign to drive wages down even further.
Let me tell you about it. It’s inspirational.
Look at the Our Walmart campaign in the United States. Our Walmart is a global campaign to improve working conditions for workers at Walmart stores. You may know that Walmart is the largest private employer in the world. Week after week, and month after month, a movement for fairness and good wages continues to grow at that massive retailer and at other big U.S. retailers like Target and TJMaxx.
There’s more. In a recent national day of action by fast food workers demanding $15 an hour, we saw incredible unity. Adjunct college professors marched with firefighters and home health care workers and, yes, fast food workers.
America wants to raise wages for all workers, full-time, part-time, temporary. We are fighting for all workers. We are working in many of the states to win paid sick days and family leave benefits. In the United States, there is no national plan to protect workers who go on maternity leave, are sick or need to care for aging relatives.
The raising wages movement in America is not coming just from organized labor. We understand that to have real power we need to build partnerships with women, civil and human rights organizations, environmental groups. It’s a true groundswell, a positive uprising with growing momentum.
Yet working people in America also have terrible challenges. One of our top priorities today is to prevent more destructive corporate-written trade laws.
Don’t get me wrong. We’re not against all trade and in fact, the AFL-CIO has supported trade agreements and trade benefit programs that we feel can positively impact workers. We’re just against bad trade, and the model we see today in the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not a model that will lessen inequality and help workers.
Right now, in the United States, we are debating a piece of legislation called Trade Promotion Authority or Fast Track. We stand against using Fast Track trade promotion authority to pass big trade bills like the TPP, because it doesn’t allow for a healthy give-and-take. Fast Trade authority only allows our Congress to conduct an up or down vote, without any amendments.
I don’t have time to get into all the nuts-and-bolts of our issues with this trade deal, and I know many people in Japan have been following this issue especially with the visit by Prime Minister Abe to Washington D.C. last week. But I will say this: We stand against using Fast Track because of our commitment to shared prosperity. Fast Track will undermine working people and undermine the American democracy. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is too big to get just an up or down vote. It would cover 40% of the world economy. Its consequences are too great. The margin for error is too small. Too many parts of it give corporations special favors and put working people at the end of the line.
At the AFL-CIO, we will continue to work in the U.S. and with our global allies for a better model of trade. We recently released a joint statement with European unions on what we would like to see in this agreement so it represents a new model with high labor and environmental standards as well as other key issues. I know here in Japan you are also looking at an agreement with Europe. We need to make sure these agreements actually work for workers.
That’s really important. We cannot let trade laws pit the workers of Japan and the workers of the United States and the other countries around the Pacific Ocean against each other in a relentless race to the bottom. We need to support each other in creating high-rode models in which our companies support strong rights for workers here in Japan and the U.S.
The way I see it, we don’t really have much of a choice. I, for one, will never accept fundamental inequality as simply a part of modern life. It’s not right. It’s unfair. It’s unjust, and we can do something about it.
Our work against bad trade policy in the United States is only part of a large, over-arching strategy in and beyond our labor movement.
Let me tell you about some of our other campaigns, because we are attacking inequality in other ways, too. We’re focusing on justice in our communities and indeed throughout our societies. We’re talking to partners and gaining new allies. We’re growing bigger coalitions, because, you see, raising wages is one link that binds together social and economic justice.
In the United States, the AFL-CIO is a major partner in nationwide campaigns to end mass incarceration and to win comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. In the United States, these campaigns are central to our work to raise wages.
It’s the right thing to do—but these are also work issues. Eleven million workers who are American in every way but on paper because they don’t have their official work documents are routinely denied fundamental workplace rights and decent wages because some bad employers call the immigration cops when workers try to organize.
That happens, even in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. And it’s fundamentally wrong. The United States is a nation of immigrants. We were built by immigrants. We remain an immigrant nation today, and I believe in the immigrant dream of coming to America to work hard and get ahead to build a better life, and my union values tell me to celebrate this dream.
When it comes to mass incarceration, one in 15 African American men is in the U.S. prison system today, while fewer than one in 100 white men are in the system—even though black and white men commit crime at roughly the same rate. It is no coincidence that the total population in the United States’ correctional system has exploded in the decades since the business of for-profit incarceration was born. This is unjust and it’s tearing apart our communities. We are criminalizing a huge population of black men, and the practice is suppressing wages because millions of people who have served their time remain locked out of the job market by employers who screen applicants for felony convictions. Working people are affected on all sides of this issue, including police and corrections officers, whose jobs are made more dangerous by mandatory sentencing laws and prison overcrowding.
Labor rights, social justice and economic justice cannot be separated, cannot be isolated. When your rights are targeted, mine are in danger. We’ve seen that again and again and again. That’s why labor must lead the progressive fight.
In the labor movement, we know how to stand together. We know to call injustice out for what it is, and fight to make it right. We know how to rally, when your picket line is my picket line and my picket line is your picket line.
And when we win, we all win. That’s the beauty of a raising wages world.
Brothers and sisters, the challenges of working people globally are legion. We’ve got political opponents who want to take us out. Employers who want to compete on lowering labor standards. In the United States, we’ve got governors falling over themselves to sign right-to-work laws to make it harder for working people to bargain for a better life.
As labor movements, our goal must be to do much more than service our members. We must provide an alternative example—one in which our collective voices steadily work for the common good.
Today, you and I are strengthening the coalition between your working people and those of the United States. This is a partnership that must grow and deepen. Wages here in Japan affect wages everywhere, and the reverse is also true. The same can be said about workers’ rights here. The same can be said about environmental standards and civil and human rights.
Coalitions can transform politics and the policies shaping our economies. I’ve seen it happen. It is hard work, but it’s the best way for working people to grow power. When we stand together, the numbers are on our side. Standing together is how we’ll build strong economies. Raising wages works. It works economically. It works politically. It’s the right thing to do, and it’ll work for every single one of us.
We’re building at every level, in electoral politics and in workplace, in our communities and internationally. We want to stand with you. We want to organize alongside you in companies where we have shared interests. We want collective bargaining in the United States to strengthen your pay and grow your opportunities here in Japan. And we want the reverse to be true.
I look forward to all the work we can accomplish together. A stronger partnership between workers of Japan and the US. I look forward, with you, to a raising wages world.
Thank you.