Berkowitz address transportation workers at the United Transportation Union, National Convention
June 14th, 2005
(Excerpted) Welcome to Alaska, the Last Frontier… where moose are a road hazard, fish are a way of life, and where people know not only the bus schedules, but the train schedules, the ferry schedules and the plane schedules.
Transportation matters to us and on behalf of Alaska, thank you for moving our freight and our people. We don’t know where we would be without you, but it certainly would be somewhere else.
Alaska is the largest state in the union, 2 ½ times the size of Texas, and move over Minnesota with your 10,000 lakes – we have 3 million. We’ve got more coastline than the rest of the country put together; the wooly mammoth is the official state fossil and the dragonfly is the official state insect – mostly because it eats the unofficial state bird, the mosquito.
We move 1 million barrels a day down the trans-Alaska Pipeline and hope to send North Slope natural gas your way soon … the largest construction project in decades, and part of the tradition of dreaming big.
But not everything that happens in Alaska is big and bold.
Alaska labor issues can have national implications – we have our own contribution to the union busting tactics that are sweeping the country.
We just finished a special session on workers comp “reform” – which meant reducing benefits for workers without reducing insurance premiums for businesses, but more importantly, an attack on the Public Employee Retirement System and the Teachers Retirement System, which will be a domino in national anti-labor politics.
This ignores the need for social justice and makes every effort to break the New Deal – which says that if you work hard and play by the rules you’ve earned the freedom that comes with a good living and a secure retirement.
Retirement security means freedom – it means dignity. It means knowing where medical care comes from and not having to give up food for medication or rent just to pay for a visit to the doctor’s office.
Here’s what they’re doing: changing from a defined benefit – you know what you’re going to get to a defined contribution – you know what you got to give. It’s a sucker’s deal and it was designed to break union power in this state.
Private sector workers suffer, too. Historically, the public sector has lower wages and better benefits. The private sector has higher wages and lower benefits. Lowering the value of public employees reduces the bargaining power of the private sector and will serve to drive down benefits.
Gov. Schwarznegger tried this in California but was driven back.
The New Deal says work hard and play by rules to earn your benefits. That replaced the notion that life was nasty, brutish and short, and thanks for working until you die.
Organized labor is under organized attack.
Leadership means responding to a call to action
You are here to improve leadership skills. Most of success is just showing up. But know what you stand for and have the courage to fight for it. Confidence in victory, in the righteousness of your cause, comes when you see honest men and women, working men and women, standing beside you, fighting beside you, knowing that we can achieve more together than we can as individuals – that the power to change the world we live in means working together.
Politics is about keeping the promise of the American Dream. Organized labor is about delivering that promise to working Americans.
In these times, we need honor and courage. And it’s up to us to supply them.
Thank you.
The United Transportation Union is an AFL-CIO affiliate headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. UTU is a broad-based, transportation labor union representing about 125,000 active and retired railroad, bus and mass transit workers in the United States and Canada.
