Remarks by AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, Labor Lives United Conference, Miami, Florida
September 04, 2010

I want to acknowledge all of you, and thank you for coming this morning.

Your presence here on this labor day weekend is a testament that you are united in your belief that the labor movement and the community, when united together, can do great things to improve the lives of our fellow citizens in need.

Too many of the families in South Florida are in trouble because of this uncertain and frightening economy, that we all find ourselves so frustrated by.

Too many Floridians are jobless. The current statistics tell us it's 10%. That is 10% too many, and things must change. These are not just statistical percentages that we are talking about, but these are real people. People you and I know.

You have all heard the African proverb "it takes a village." Sisters and brothers, our village is in trouble. And the truth is, we couldn't divorce ourselves from each other if we wanted to.

Oh sure, we could make a decision to ignore each other's plight. We could turn a deaf ear to the voices and cries of those suffering. We could look suffering in the face and close our eyes to it, but that is not who we are. We are not a people who believes that the YOYO philosophy is a sound one. You know what YOYO stands for – "You are on Your Own." We are not YOYO people, but we are the people who believe that we are our brother's and our sister's keepers.

In the end, our neighbor's prosperity remains tied to our own. Whether we like it or not, we're going to rise or fall together.

That's true about individual workers and families, but it's also true of labor and business.

How did we get stuck with this false notion that our interests are in opposition to each other?

Economists – even some of the most prominent conservative economists at the University of Chicago – agree that working people are the tide that lifts all boats. Living here in Florida, you know something about tides – so you know that a rising tide does lift all boats.

That line was John F. Kennedy's. Did you know that? It was later incorporated by Ronald Reagan to justify tax cuts and the trickle-down economy – and even later to describe the tech and housing bubbles, but that's not how the phrase was originally used.

President Kennedy was in Colorado in 1963. He was there for the ground-breaking of construction to build a dam, a project that his political opponents had derided as pork-barrel politics, as irresponsible deficit spending.

Well, Kennedy argued that the waters from the dam would provide a public good, and he employed the metaphor of a rising tide to describe the influx of the workers' wages into local economy. The idea was the tide of wages would lift all business boats. That was Kennedy acknowledging that the workers would pour their money into the local economy. And he was right.

If you look at the problems we have in America today, they all trace back to our struggling middle class, and the fact that our local economies are starved for cash.

And the only way we're going to bring America back is with Kennedy-style economic patriotism – with the idea that promoting good jobs in America isn't bad economics, it's patriotic and good for business, and good for public education and other government services because of the enhanced tax revenues.

It's also good for charities like United Way. When people have good jobs and don't have to worry about their family's economic soundness and security, they are more likely to give back and volunteer. I think about this, as a member of United Way's National Board.

It's how a village gets back on track.

I want to tell you a story that's important to me, about the problems we face in America, and efforts we've made toward solutions.

About a month ago, I was in a church in Atlanta at a hearing about the Big Banks' role in the home foreclosure crisis. The hearing was sponsored by the AFL-CIO and the Atlanta Fighting Foreclosure Coalition. And the witnesses were people who had worked hard to build better lives for themselves only to have their American dreams shattered by losing their homes to foreclosure.

It was so important for us to be there, shining a light on a problem that remains too hidden. No one is proud of losing their home – no one broadcasts that humiliating news. And so for too long, our nation's most profitable banks have posted those foreclosure signs and tossed people out, often when other, more equitable options remained.

We were able to shine that light for one reason – because we heard the cry of a community and worked hand-in-hand with the community to respond.

As witness after witness told their stories, it became clear that the problem was not greedy people wanting too much house, the problem was not just workers who had lost jobs, become disabled, missed mortgage payments and lost homes, although there was some of that.

The problem was even bigger. It became evident that – working people across the board are suffering from the worst economic crisis in 75 years and all kinds of families are entangled in the subprime mortgage crisis – 3 million families all told. And in some cases, the lending was all but guaranteed to result in disaster.

One witness was Gloria McAlpin. Her late husband had been a police officer for 23 years before suffering a head injury that kept him from his job. She herself was disabled. Struggling to pay medical bills and to hang on to a home with only disability payments coming in, the McAlpins were misled into accepting an abusive mortgage refinance loan that ended up taking 88 percent of their income. Eighty-eight percent!

Can you imagine Gloria's suffering?

And then there was the father of two children who were both on the honor role at their elementary school. At the hearing, he broke down and cried as he told us of the pain he feels forced to move his children out of the school where they are showing so much promise. But, if the bank doesn't renegotiate his subprime mortgage by adjusting his principal and interest, he will have no choice. Although he participated on our panel he didn't want to do television or radio interviews for fear his children would find out that they were soon going to be evicted. That's pain, sisters and brothers. That's pain.

After the hearing, leaders from faith, labor and local communities rallied together and we met with Wells Fargo officials to ask for fair treatment for homeowners struggling to stave off foreclosure. We asked in the name of Gloria McAlpin and others like her. We asked because fair treatment is not too much to want.

We also asked that those representatives of one of our nation's largest and most profitable bank make other changes in the name of fairness. We asked them to lower interest rates on payday loans; some people get stuck with 300 percent interest.

At times, one person's vulnerability becomes another's opportunity. Between equals, that's not necessarily a justice issue. But when opportunity becomes predatory, locking victims into cycles of deeper and deeper poverty, it becomes injustice.

And here's the good news. At a follow up meeting about two weeks ago with Wells Fargo in Washington, D.C., national officials for that bank committed to modifying their devastating loan products and to engaging more fairly with homeowners.

The reason I want to tell this story is its lesson in partnership, in bringing people together – the catalyst that comes from people coming together with a common cause.

The United Way in Miami-Dade has been up to its eyeballs in this community's layoffs and the desperate needs of working families on the brink.

Workers are losing jobs at places where we've never seen layoffs before, from utilities, and from places that we thought were safe – from health care facilities.

We're seeing foreclosures, empty homes, rising crime. Times are desperate, and people are desperate.

That's why jobs are important. That's why partnerships are important. We need to live united.

That brings me to my final point. One hundred years ago, America struggled with the idea of unions. There was this popular consensus that unions were for tradesmen – skilled carpenters and machinists – but not for miners or factory workers, seamstresses or textile workers or for people holding other jobs considered too low and unskilled.

It didn't matter that those so-called low-skill jobs earned the manufacturing and mining companies generous profits. The general public simply held an antipathy toward unions, and toward the new Polish, German, Italian and Slavic immigrants who wanted to come together to bargain for better wages and working conditions.

The debates today are remarkably similar to those a century ago. Immigrants today want the same things as immigrants a hundred years ago wanted – dignity, respect, and the right to a fair wage.

Union leaders find ourselves being demonized by those puppets of corporate greed and those voices that fill our airwaves with hate speech and a message of division. In some ways, the more things change the more they remain the same.

There will always be those who want to keep workers in their place, but I know that the only place for a worker is in his or her union. The union is the only place that workers coming together will find the panacea for dignity and respect on the job, for better wages and benefits, for safer working conditions, and yes, for a voice on the job.

I believe workers should have the freedom to decide for themselves whether to form unions, and to bargain for a better life, and I know that when workers began to organize freely, that it turned bad jobs into good jobs, it ushered in America's greatest period of prosperity, and the greatest middle class that the world has ever known.

It wasn't perfect, but it was good, and those same unions – inspired by the rights of working people – joined in the fight for civil rights and equality for all Americans.

I don't believe that America can or should long to return to days gone by, but we should take our lessons from the past, and we should understand that tools that worked once can work again. Remember Kennedy's economic patriotism and Roosevelt's New Deal. They worked!

And I also know that we've built a lot of jobs in America over the past 30 years, but not enough of them have been good jobs.

By organizing into unions, people can still transform bad jobs into good ones.

That's one key to rebuilding the middle class in Florida and America.

And when that tide rises, everything will rise with it: real estate, small businesses, working families.

That's a vision of the future we can celebrate—together.

Let's make our vision of the future come true. United and working together we have a chance. Happy Labor Day.

Photo: AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker. (Courtesy AFL-CIO)