A Message from AFL-CIO President John Sweeney

Dear Working Families e-Activist:

Every day I hear from working family activists who are ready and eager to fight for what we believe is best about America. They are not discouraged by the start of President Bush’s second term, even though he and his allies in Congress attack our jobs, paychecks, health care, retirement security and basic rights. In fact, they are more revved up than ever.

Everywhere around the country, working people are telling me they won’t allow our country to be hijacked by an agenda based on corrupt principles. We have a vision of what this country should be, they say, and we are not giving it up.

The president was re-elected by the narrowest of margins. He has not won a mandate for his proposed assaults on basic security, basic decency and our basic values. We won’t accept his effort to privatize Social Security, cut taxes for the wealthy and raise them for workers, slash investment in schools and health care, roll back environmental protections, free corporations from accountability and pack the courts with ideologues intent on turning back the rights of women and others. 

I believe America will reject his agenda designed to benefit the wealthy, corporate special interests and right-wing extremists at the expense of working families.

But it’s going to be a battle. Let me tell you what’s coming.

Social Security: We are going to stop President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security that would cut benefits drastically, make retirement less rather than more secure and saddle our children with $2 trillion in debt in the first 10 years alone. You’ve already made a difference by getting more than 500,000 copies of the Petition to Protect Social Security to lawmakers and urging investment companies like Charles Schwab to drop support for privatization. In the coming weeks we will do much more together as the fight for Social Security heats up.

Good Jobs: Together we’re going to turn around the trend of rewarding companies for exporting good U.S. jobs and hold corporations accountable for the Wal-Marting of jobs and benefits. No more trade agreements that sell out America to the lowest bidder. No more sweetheart deals for rich companies that pay so little and offer such lousy benefits their workers end up on Medicaid. We need jobs that pay living wages and provide family health care coverage and secure retirement benefits. We’re through taking a backseat to corporate greed and the politicians who coddle it.

Freedom to Choose a Union: U.S. and international law promise us the basic right to choose for ourselves whether to join together with coworkers to bargain with our employers for safe jobs, decent working conditions and the best way to get work done. Today that’s an empty promise because employers routinely harass, intimidate and even fire workers who try to form unions. Our labor laws are too weak and our government, led by the most anti-union administration in modern times, fails to enforce even those inadequate protections. Together we’re going to blow the whistle on worker abuses—we’re going to take the fight for workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain to the boardroom, city hall, the state house and the U.S. Capitol and say in our loudest voices: "No more!"

Again and again over the coming months we are going work together for what we believe in—we’re going to rally, picket, phone and fax, e-mail and talk to everyone we know to enlist a powerful army in the fight for working families. It’s going to take determination, nonstop commitment and unlimited energy. It’s going to take every one of us. And it’s going to succeed.

I’m not ready to give up on what I know America can be and should be and will be. I know you are not either. I look forward to our work together.

In solidarity,

John Sweeney
AFL-CIO President
Jan. 26, 2005