Obama to Building Trades: ‘Rebuild This Country’
May 4, 2012
In a rousing address to attendees of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades 2012 Legislative Conference April 30, President Barack Obama highlighted his vision of a middle class resurgence powered by infrastructure investments. At the same time, he expressed dismay at the right-wing attacks on workers that have grabbed headlines and stymied job growth for more than a year.
“It’s always an honor to be with folks who get up every day and fight for America’s workers,” the president said to the 2,600 attendees gathered in the grand ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the second day of the four-day conference:
Together, you represent the latest in a long, proud line of men and women who have built this country from the ground up … You [believe] that prosperity shouldn’t be reserved for the privileged few – it should extend from the boardroom all the way to the factory floor. American progress has always been driven by American workers, and that’s especially important to remember today.
American workers built this country. Now we need American workers to rebuild this country.
Emphasizing the conference’s theme, “Building a Better Tomorrow,” Obama said that his administration’s support of bargaining rights goes hand in hand with high-road construction practices:
I believe our economy is stronger when workers are getting paid good wages and good benefits. I believe all of us are better off when we have broad-based prosperity that grows outward from a strong middle class. And I believe when folks try and take collective bargaining rights away by passing so-called “right-to-work” laws that might as well be called “the right-to-work-for-less-and-less,” that’s not about economics – it’s about politics.
That’s why we’ve reversed harmful decisions designed to undermine those rights, and passed the Fair Pay Act to help stop pay discrimination. That’s why we’ve supported Davis-Bacon. And that’s why we’ve reversed the ban on project labor agreements.
As long as I serve as your president, I’m going to keep it up.
Obama also touched on much of the congressional gridlock that he said was tainting the environment for possible bipartisan solutions. “[O]ver the last year, I’ve sent Congress a whole series of jobs bills that would have put your members back to work. But time after time, Republicans have gotten together and said ‘no,’” Obama said:
I sent them a jobs bill that would have put hundreds of thousands of construction workers back to work repairing our roads, bridges, schools and transit systems, along with saving the jobs of cops, teachers, and firefighters and creating a new tax cut for businesses. They said “no.” … As we speak, House Republicans are refusing to pass a bipartisan bill that could guarantee work for millions of construction workers. Seeing a pattern here? That makes no sense.
But we can’t wait for Congress to do its job. You can’t afford to wait. And where Congress won’t act, I will.
Obama also paid tribute to the memory of former Building Trades President Mark Ayers, who died suddenly April 8. “Mark was a tremendous leader, and his commitment to the labor movement and to working people will leave a mark for years to come,” the president said. “My thoughts and prayers are with his family.”
The speech elicited many rounds of applause, standing ovations and cheers from the crowd, comprised of members of the 13 unions represented by the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO. Calls for “Four More Years” by audience members were also joined with boos when the president mentioned his political opponents’ support for tax cuts for the wealthy or rolling back workers’ rights.
Obama spoke at the same conference four years ago, where he previously voiced his support of middle-class workers ahead of his election.
IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill was on the stage with other labor leaders to greet Obama before his morning address. “It was an honor to hear the president’s timely message about how to strengthen both the middle class and boost employment in the hard-hit union construction sector,” Hill said:
The upcoming presidential election is going to be the most important contest in generations, and we need to actively support candidates who share our vision of a robust construction industry providing broad prosperity, not wealth distribution back to the richest 1 percent.
The following day, the building trades unions announced their endorsement for Obama in November. Building Trades President Sean McGarvey said:
While middle class America was being thrown into the despair and outright fear of economic insecurity, congressional Republican leaders have continually thumbed their noses at bipartisan cooperation and flatly stated that it will always be their top priority to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president.
And Mitt Romney has bought into that same philosophy, a philosophy that offers nothing for the protection and strengthening of the American middle class.
To read the president’s entire speech, and for more information on the Building Trades 2012 Legislative Conference, visit www.bctd.org.
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