Thanks Pete (District 2 VP Pete Catucci) for that introduction and for what you do for our union. Faced with adversity, you make us all stronger. Faced with a keen sense of the value of each day, you help us take our own lives more seriously. We commit to you to fight for embryonic stem cell research and a cure for ALS.
We will elect a president, Barack Obama who will sign this legislation proudly—no more vetoes! We also commit that we will work even harder to elect Barack Obama and to pass the Employee Free Choice Act in the next year.
Also, a special welcome to President Emeritus Bahr and wife Florence, and Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus Booe and his wife, Judy.
Three years ago, as a newly elected Executive Board, our theme was "Working Together." We knew that the times would keep getting tougher and that we could only make a difference by working together. Not just the three executive officers, or the Executive Board, but local officers and stewards.
We faced unprecedented corporate greed—management that saw nothing wrong with CEOs that made five hundred times the pay of a front line worker and then talked about teamwork.
We faced the worst President of the U.S. ever, who talked about the ownership society and really meant you're on your own.
And too often, our own members who wanted results but not struggle, viewing the union more as a vending machine where you put your dues in and instead of candy, out comes a contract.
We don't offer candy, but we do offer the best chance to change things together, now and for the future.
The best chance to make a difference in the face of incredible odds. And Our Time is Now.
I want to thank Barbara, Jeff, and this Board for three great years. This Board has worked harder than any other; dug deeper and faced greater challenges, but never quit or looked back, never made excuses. Tonight, we will honor Barbara for 57 years of service, 23 as Executive Vice President and Secretary-Treasurer. In the best tradition of CWA leaders, she returns to her roots as a volunteer, working for Obama in Virginia, and serving the homeless.
We have a window of opportunity this year that we haven't seen in a generation. We have an opportunity to fundamentally change the direction of America…to restore our labor movement, restore the middle class, and give hope to millions.
We must prevail in the 2008 elections and win a White House and a Congress dedicated to progressive change. And we can do it, because Americans are crying out for change.
Only one presidential candidate offers positive change, and the other only promises more of the same policies that are ruining our country.
After more than five years of the Iraq war, we continue to suffer a steady loss of life and injuries, and to drain our financial resources by over $2 billion each week. Meanwhile, John McCain talks about a 100-year presence in Iraq and jokes about bombing Iran.
We have a $700 billion annual trade deficit, which is helping to send the dollar crashing to record lows and transfer our assets to China and the Middle East. We have the worst credit crunch since the Great Depression and the highest rate of home mortgage foreclosures in decades. Gasoline, home heating oil, food and other vital commodities are at record highs – and still soaring. Real wages are down, and good manufacturing jobs continue to vanish. And there is no coincidence in the fact that the United States has the lowest rate of collective bargaining coverage among the world's economic democracies.
John McCain still talks about how our economy is strong and describes our problems as "psychological." His prescription for the health care crisis: taxing employer-provided health benefits, which will drive those employers who still provide benefits to drop their coverage. He thinks NAFTA was good for America. He talks about reviving the Bush plan to privatize Social Security. He voted to keep the Employee Free Choice Act from coming to the Senate floor.
McCain and the congressional Republicans are on the wrong side of every issue that working Americans care about today. Barack Obama stands with us on our key issues: workers' rights, universal health care, creating and keeping good jobs in this country, and protecting retirement security.
These are the issues behind our Convention theme – Building a Political Movement. That's what we've been doing, and that's what we must keep on doing when we walk out of this Convention.
CWA local unions and staff are leading the way in building the Million Member Mobilization for the Employee Free Choice Act. When I met with House Education and Labor chair George Miller in January, he said, "Give me a Democratic President and this Speaker and we will enact the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009." He then went on to say that he hoped to see the faces and cards of one million supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act when he returns to Congress next January.
The Million Member Mobilization is exactly that—a million members from all of labor committed to signing up, emailing and turning up at an event, if necessary, and understanding that our bargaining rights are worth working and voting for.
We can draw strength and inspiration as we go forward from the fact that CWA truly is a union on the move, and that we've been successfully fighting back, despite hard economic and political times in recent years. Take a look at the convention Highlights book, and join me in celebrating the fact that we are truly raising the bar and moving our union in the right direction.
Last November, and again in races this spring, CWA locals and activists were instrumental in key political wins in Virginia, Kentucky, New Jersey, Indiana, Louisiana and Mississippi. In those latter, Deep South states, we helped elect pro-worker Democrats to congressional seats that Republicans had held for decades. This demonstrates that change is coming in 2008.
In several of these elections, we worked closely with the United Steelworkers, our partners in a new political alliance that includes the United Auto Workers and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Together, by rallying the strength of a combined three million workers and retirees, we're building a political movement to turn this country around.
In the last year, we also forged a unique international alliance, joining with Germany's largest union – Ver.di – to support U.S. workers at T-Mobile. T-Mobile workers in the U.S. can now join the T-Union as members of both CWA and Ver.di and backed by more than 100,000 German workers at T-Mobile and its parent Deutsche Telekom. We're telling management: this is our response to globalization – global unions.
In recent months, we helped 3,500 new AT&T workers organize – most of them in the southern states of District 3 – through majority sign-up. Another card check campaign for 1,000 adult home care providers in New Jersey brought recognition for the first bargaining unit of its kind anywhere. We organized through traditional NLRB elections too, overcoming anti-union campaigns among 500 workers at LifePath in Pennsylvania and at New Era Cap in Alabama.
Our Buffalo, New York hospital workers won a huge victory this year through their relentless, year-long political mobilization when the State Department of Health announced that key hospitals, employing 4,000 members, would remain open.
There were several bargaining breakthroughs for CWA members in the public sector.
A landmark agreement for 6,000 New Jersey child care workers substantially raised pay and called for the first grievance and arbitration process of any child care contract in the nation. In Jackson, Mississippi, 1,200 city workers gained their first contract and workers in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, also achieved a first agreement this year. Political activism in Arizona also brought "meet and confer" bargaining to 3,600 CWA corrections officers.
CWA Newspaper Guild members in Puerto Rico ended a 5-year struggle at Univision, with a back pay settlement ranging as high as $18,000 in lump sum payments for senior employees and substantial base pay improvements. CWA members took on another media giant, Time Warner, in Utica, New York, where a small cable unit waged an inspirational struggle and secured a contract despite management's campaign to crush their union. The workers beat back a decertification effort last year and mounted a textbook public outreach campaign.
Over the past year, CWA moved ahead with the goals we set forth in our Ready for the Future program, including historic action to expand the Executive Board to reflect our union's diversity and add the perspective of local leaders. Following Convention action last year, the Board appointed four members to at-large diversity seats, from nominations by the National Equity and Women's Committees and the Minority Caucus. The at-large members will be elected at this Convention.
The Canadian Director is also represented on the Board and constitutional changes are proposed this year reflecting the autonomy of the Canadian region. We have also moved forward with our Canadian Alliance of USW and CWA.
We have moved ahead with key Strategic Industry Fund campaigns:
-- CWA's Speed Matters campaign to spur jobs and economic development through promoting high-speed Internet deployment elevated this issue into the Presidential race last fall and helped win passage of high-speed programs in several more states. Only last week, as a result of our work, the FCC has increased minimum speed for broadband upstream and down and set goals for future development.
-- The SIF campaign at Verizon resulted in regulators in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire requiring greater financial commitments and service guarantees as part of Verizon's sale of its telecom network to FairPoint Communications. CWA and IBEW testified at hearings, lobbied governors and lawmakers, and mounted a media campaign. In the end, Verizon was required to spend an additional $549 million to cut its sale price and FairPoint had to commit an additional $600 million to bolster service.
-- Through the health care campaign, an army of activists is starting to fan out across the country to build a movement in at least 121 targeted Congressional districts to fight for affordable health care for all. The health care campaign and fight for Employee Free Choice, another SIF effort, are being closely linked in our 2008 election program. At this stage, it is critical that each of us bring a message to our employers: "Get off our backs and by our side and together we can change health care in the U.S." Our employers need to join us in promoting universal health care, funded with a broad based tax so that all employers pay their fair share. The race to the bottom is over.
Renewed efforts to reach out to members and explain the importance of political action resulted in a surge of CWA-COPE participation during 2007. The number of locals with over 10 percent participation grew by 9.5 percent, with a 13 percent increase in $1-per-week contributors.
As we focus on the critical goal of restoring organizing and bargaining rights through the Employee Free Choice Act, union leaders around the world are watching with keen interest. CWA was a driving force in bringing global union leaders to Washington, D.C., in December for a forum on workers' rights, and in arranging a hearing with key members of Congress. They told our lawmakers that shrinking collective bargaining rights in the U.S. – currently the lowest in the developed world at 7.5 percent of the private sector – threatens labor standards in other nations.
Workers in the airline industry have their own unique challenges to winning bargaining rights. Rather than winning a majority of votes from those participating in an election, they must win "union yes" votes from a majority of the entire bargaining unit. Those who don't vote are considered to have voted "no union." Despite this handicap, flight attendants at Delta Airlines mounted a tremendous campaign, enlisting an internal organizing committee of 1,000 activists. They fell short of a majority of the 13,300 eligible voters last month because of the uniquely difficult election process – and an aggressive voter suppression campaign by management. But they paved the way for eventually getting a union when Delta merges with Northwest Airlines, where flight attendants gained AFA-CWA representation only a few years ago and now will work to build on it and keep it.
We also had our struggles and disappointments in both the public and private sectors, but these success stories should inspire us to reach even higher in setting our goals and finding the determination to overcome tough obstacles. With a vision, with a strategic plan, and above all, with a unified effort, there is so much we can achieve.
And as we look toward this fall's elections, here is our vision: Imagine a year from now when we meet at Convention in Washington, D.C., a few blocks away, President Barack Obama will occupy the White House. With the support of greater pro-worker majorities in Congress, we will have passed the Employee Free Choice Act by then and opened a new era of union growth and collective bargaining. We will be on the way to establishing a universal health care system, removing that contentious issue from the bargaining table. And imagine how political change will impact trade policy, job creation, pension and Social Security issues and other priorities for working families.
We have the opportunity to make that amazing vision a reality. As we leave this Convention on Wednesday, let's draw energy and strength from each other, and let's resolve to dig deeper within ourselves… to work harder than we ever have in a political campaign. We can turn this country around. It's within our reach. This is our time!
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