AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka's Address in Cleveland
Richard L. Trumka, AFL-CIO
June 19, 2010
Richard Trumka is arguably labor's most gifted communicator. He thinks big
without straying from his roots. It's a raw and powerful blend.
Thank you, President Roller [City Club Board President Jan Roller].
Good afternoon. I am delighted to be here with you in the great city of
Cleveland. I want to talk to you about the grave economic challenges we face
today - and the labor movement's vision for where we need to go.
There is no better place to have a discussion about our economic challenges
than Cleveland-where business and labor built the American middle class.
Cleveland embodies both the consequences of our failed economic policies of
the last three decades - and our hope for a different future.
The economic crisis has hit hard here-116,000 lost jobs in the last decade
in Cuyahoga County. Eighty-six thousand home foreclosures last year alone. A
self-defeating attempt to address budget shortfalls by attacking school
budgets and teachers.
But we can also see a glimpse of a better future in the Lake Erie wind
turbine project-with turbines built here in Ohio, in the OneCommunity
Project fiber optic network, and in Cleveland's role as a global center of
fuel cell development.
We're at a turning point today. The economic course our nation started on in
1980-the effort to have a low-wage, high-consumption society that imports
more and more of what it consumes-has hit the wall. We cannot afford to stay
this course- of letting the private sector and the financial markets run
amok, of outsourcing everything that's not nailed to the floor, and of
pushing down workers every chance we get. And last night's vote by
Republicans in the United States Senate to block a simple extension of
unemployment benefits for the most hard-pressed people without jobs is just
the latest shame. At some point, there is nobody left to buy the junk that
we import from everywhere but here.
We now face a future of prolonged high unemployment and stagnant or falling
wages-unless we do something different.
Today I am going to talk about doing something different.
We need a new national economic strategy for a global economy.
At the heart of our strategy must be a workforce with world class skills and
world class rights and trade policies that serve the interests of the
American people. But today I also want to talk to you about what may seem
like a strange subject--immigration--because it is patently clear that we
cannot talk about our national workforce strategy unless we face head-on our
own contradictions, hypocrisy and history on immigration.
The truth is that in a dynamic global economy in the 21st century, we simply
cannot afford to have millions of hard-working people without legal
protections, without meaningful access to higher education, shut off from
the high-wage, high-productivity economy. It is just too costly to waste all
that talent and strength and drive.
But immigration reform is not just an economic issue. The way we as a nation
treat the immigrants among us is about more than economic strategy-it is
about who we are as a nation.
I grew up in a small town in Southwestern Pennsylvania, not that far from
here. The immigrant path led from the coalmines to Pittsburgh to Cleveland.
And if you look around Cleveland at the ethnic clubs and the churches, you
see a city that immigrants built--Hungarians and Poles, Irish and Italians,
Serbs and Croats and Jews, as well as African Americans. Cleveland is a city
where the traditions of the places we came from are the very foundation of
our community.
It was not easy when my family came to this country. My parents fled poverty
and war from different corners of Europe. When I was a kid, there was an
ugly name for every one of us in all twelve languages spoken in Nemacolin,
PA-wop and hunkie and polack and kike. We were the last hired and first
fired, the people who did the hardest and most dangerous work, the people
whose pay got shorted because we didn't know the language and were afraid to
complain.
We got to the mines and the mills, and the people already there said we were
taking their jobs, ruining their country. Yet in the end the immigrants of
my parents' and grandparents' generation prevailed, and built America. This
is the history of my family, and this is the story of Cleveland and
Pittsburgh and Detroit and Chicago and Baltimore and a thousand cities and
towns across America.
And yet today I hear from working people who should know better, some in my
own family - that those immigrants are taking our jobs, ruining our country.
Haven't we been here before?
When I hear that kind of talk, I want to say, did an immigrant move your
plant overseas? Did an immigrant take away your pension? Or cut your health
care? Did an immigrant destroy American workers' right to organize? Or crash
the financial system? Did immigrant workers write the trade laws that have
done so much harm to Ohio?
My friends, we are most of us the children of immigrants.
But there was no labor movement in America until workers learned to look at
each other and see not immigrants and native born, not white and black, not
different last names, but our common fate as workers.
The labor movement believes that our goal as a nation should be a future of
shared prosperity - not stubborn unemployment and a lost generation. That
our economic strategy must bring us together instead of driving us apart.
Our strategy must help us be the kind of country we want our children to
thrive in-the country our history tells us we can be. The home of the
American Dream.
So exactly what is the American Dream? Some will tell you the American Dream
is the idea that in America anyone can become rich. And the fact that the
upper reaches of our society are relatively open is a good thing about our
country-but it is not the American Dream.
The American Dream is not that a few of us will get to be rich, but that all
of us will have a fair portion of the good things in life. Time to be with
our families. The chance for our children to get an education and the
opportunity to make their own way in the world. Laws that protect us, not
oppress us.
The American labor movement is all about the pursuit and the defense of this
idea of America. And we have learned through our history that it is only
when working people stand together-in the workplace and at the polling
place-that the American Dream is secure.
Recently, the American Dream brought a man my age named Elvino and his son
Ramon to America from Mexico. They are experienced bricklayers and were
hired to work on a large mixed-use housing development-a public project.
They and thirty others worked for five weeks, and the contractor just never
paid them.
For too many immigrants seeking the American Dream, this is the American
reality. Hard work rewarded with ripoffs. And then no way to seek justice.
That's why I am so proud to be able to say that Elvino, Ramon and their
co-workers are taking this injustice to the U.S. Department of Labor, thanks
to the efforts of Bricklayers Union Local 18 in Cincinnati and the
Interfaith Worker Rights Center-whose members understand that truly an
injury to one is an injury to all.
Immigration to the United States is part of a larger picture-the picture of
how we are getting globalization wrong. There is no better way to understand
that than to look at what has happened between the United States and Mexico
since NAFTA was implemented in 1994.
NAFTA was sold to the American public on the idea that increasing trade with
Mexico would create good jobs in both countries and slow the flow of
undocumented workers coming to the U.S. from Mexico.
Instead, inequality has grown and workers' rights have eroded in both the
U.S. and Mexico since NAFTA's passage. And illegal immigration flows have
tripled.
Today we treat our relationship with Mexico as if it were a national
security problem-solvable with military aid and a militarized border. And
that is a dangerous mistake. The failures of our relationship with Mexico
represent a failed economic strategy. They cannot be solved with guns and
soldiers and fences. They must be addressed through an economic strategy for
shared prosperity based on rising wages in both countries.
Instead, at the heart of the failure of our immigration policy is an
unpleasant fact, one that you almost never hear talked about openly: Too
many U.S. employers actually like the current state of the immigration
system-a system where immigrants are both plentiful and undocumented-afraid
and available. Too many employers like a system where our borders are closed
and open at the same time-closed enough to turn immigrants into second-class
citizens, open enough to ensure an endless supply of socially and legally
powerless cheap labor.
Our immigration system makes a mockery of the American dream. The people
doing the hardest work for the least money have no legal protections, no
ability to send their children to college, no real right to form a union, no
economic or legal security-no way to turn their contributions-their years of
hard work-into the most fundamental right of all, the right to vote. That is
intolerable for a democracy.
Recently, I met a young woman named Fabiola, who came to the United States
when she was two years old. Her parents have worked in the United States for
twenty-two years. Fifteen years ago, her father became a U.S. citizen, so
all her younger siblings who were born here also are citizens. But Fabiola
fell through the legal cracks and is now too old to become a citizen under
current immigration law.
But that has not stopped her from working hard to live the American Dream.
Recently, she graduated from the University of California with a degree in
international development. But she cannot find a job in her field because
she is undocumented.
How does Fabiola's story make any sense in economic or human terms? Her
talents and her education are being squandered because our immigration
system is simply not working
That is why the AFL-CIO is fighting to fix this broken immigration system as
a crucial element of our broader economic strategy. Because we stand for the
American Dream for all who work in our country. Because we are for ending
our two-tiered workforce and our two-tiered society. And because an
underclass of disenfranchised workers ends up hurting all workers.
But we are not for any kind of immigration reform. We will not support the
return to outdated guest worker programs that give immigrants no security,
no future here in the United States, no rights and no hope of being part of
the American Dream.
Immigration reform must begin with the principle that workers in the United
States deserve to enjoy a fair share of the wealth we create-that wages
should move up with productivity. The labor movement and a broad coalition
of faith-based and immigrants' rights groups have worked with former
Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall to put together such a program for
comprehensive immigration reform.
The AFL-CIO is for a fair path toward legalization for all undocumented
workers who are working to realize the American Dream. We are for the DREAM
Act, that gives young people like Fabiola a future in the only country they
know.
We need an independent commission to determine our society's genuine need
for more immigrants, and then we need to build a pathway that allows
immigrants to be securely part of our country from day one-able to assert
their legal rights, including the right to organize, without fear of
retaliation.
And together with this commission, going forward we are for establishing
real penalties for employers who break the law. We must focus enforcement
not on those who come here seeking the American Dream, but on those who
would exploit them.
This is the reform the labor movement is fighting for.
But instead, we see today a dangerous drift toward a politics of hate. Last
month, I went to Arizona to stand with working people who were the target of
a hate campaign-a campaign for racial profiling waged by the state
legislature and signed into law by the governor. A campaign to make anyone
who might look like an immigrant live in fear of the police. All of us
should fear such a system: In the end, don't all of us who aren't Native
Americans look like the immigrants and children of immigrants that we are?
As President of the AFL-CIO, my message to working people is that we all are
bound together by our lives as workers, our dreams for our families, and our
hopes for this country's future. The labor movement stands for giving all
workers in America the right to dream the American Dream.
Unfortunately, the American Dream is slipping away.
Today, as in any economic crisis, there are people who offer hatred and
divisiveness as the solution to the crisis. If our political leaders do not
lead, if they do not offer help in the present and a clear strategy for
prosperity in the future-starting with good jobs-those voices of hate will
grow, they will become more powerful, and they will feed on the public's
anger and pain and desperation.
President Obama has laid out in broad terms the approach we need to take. He
has spoken out for creating good jobs, rebuilding manufacturing, taking on
the challenge of climate change and energy independence, growing exports and
investing in our infrastructure, including our education infrastructure.
If we are truly going to build a world class workforce, we need to restore
workers' fundamental human right to organize and bargain with their
employers. And we need to make sure every worker in America - documented or
undocumented - is protected by our labor laws. That is why it is so urgent
that we reform our immigration system.
The President's strategy also requires that we invest in rebuilding our
country. Consider this fact-as a result of the economic recovery act, we are
now in the process of planning approximately 500 miles of high-speed rail,
including lines here in Ohio. Sounds good, until you realize that China, a
country about the same size as the United States, is in the process of
constructing 5,000 miles of high-speed rail.
Restoring workers' rights and building workers' skills. Creating the
infrastructure of the 21st century. Thinking strategically when it comes to
trade policy. These are the strategies for making the American Dream as real
for our children as it was for my parents.
But that will not be enough. We as a nation must be true to our better
selves-employers must not make a buck on the backs of workers who live in
fear of deportation, and workers must stand together in the workplace for
good jobs, safe jobs, health care for all, and retirement security we can
count on. And so when we talk about making the American Dream real, the
labor movement stands for making it real for all of us who do the work of
our country. All of us-no matter what we look like, who we choose to love,
or where we come from. Surely there we can find common ground.
Thank you.
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