Remarks by Bruce Popper - Labor Day 2011

(Rochester & Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation)

Remarks of Bruce Popper

First Vice-president

Rochester and Vicinity Labor Council, AFL-CIO

Labor Day “We Are One” Press Conference

September 5, 2011

            We have a pretty daunting task ahead of us.  It falls on us, the activists, to restore hope, courage, and vision to the working classes of America.

            In late 2008, we thought we had turned a corner.  Our values of social and economic justice prevailed.  In the midst of the great recession, working families believed they could win - after decades of our economic stagnation, the White House was ours and so was the Congress.

            But we were naive if we thought that the wealthy and powerful would just give up, that they would negotiate a new New Deal and restore the American Dream to the growing millions for whom it had become a bad joke.

            The counterattack spawned the Tea Party and elected people with unbelievably extremist, pro-capitalist views, like Congresswoman Ann Marie Buerkle and others.

            I was asked to talk today about health care, one of the core values of our “We Are One - Rochester Network” movement.  But talking about health care is the same as talking about any of our other fundamental human needs that are now going unmet:  jobs, education, retirement security, housing, and investment in people, not profit.  Defending Medicare and Medicaid is the same struggle.  While all the economic gains of the past several decades have gone to the wealthy, their tax burden has plummeted, leaving us with huge holes in state and Federal budgets.  And while the government can bail out Wall Street, it can’t find a way to lift up Main Street.

            The simple truth, brothers and sisters, is that nobody is going to win this fight but us.  There is no White House EMS team to rescue working families.  There is no magical election to win that will right these wrongs.  There is only the people most impacted, our union members and the majority of other workers who have been stopped from joining our ranks.

            They say that the darkest hour is just before the dawn.  But whether the sun rises or whether we continue to be ruled by the dark side of the force is up to us.  It is the task before us.  For the sake of our children and the generations to follow, we must not fail.

* Rochester's Labor Day Parade press conference also featured RLC President Jim Bertolone, CSEA President Danny Donahue, Citizen Action NY Organizing Director Rosemary Rivera, and leaders of NYSUT, Rochester Building Trades, Social Workers Federation, and the RLC Retirees Committee.