Brothers and Sisters, 

It is with great pleasure and humility that I have been invited as a guest here today. I would like to start off with congratulating you on a successful selection of officers using a one man one vote method that has made this Federation a democratic union whose officers report to the membership. You have chosen well and I would like to congratulate Anthony Sessa and his team of officers on their reelection. I am heartened to know that my home Federation is in good hands going forward. I would also like to congratulate Brother Justin Brown and Frank Parell on their recent election by the membership to lead the Commuter Railroad System Federation. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my friends from METRA, Manuel Zavala. After a long hard struggle our Chicago Brothers and Sisters have been able to achieve self determination for METRA members.

I remember my first meetings with the METRA members and their rank and file leadership. I saw a System designed for white freight union officers that made no sense. Three federations literally fed off a group of urban minority commuter workers who were gerrymandered in such a way they were politically marginalized in their respective assigned Federations. We can thank the vision and the backbone of President Simpson for putting an end to this structural racism with his program for single systems on single roads. It is good to see that METRA brothers and sisters enjoying self determination and their own organization upon which they can be proud.

One man one vote and one passenger rail system under the leadership of General Chairperson Anthony Sessa have produced the best contracts in the Brotherhood and the strongest on the ground trade union organization anywhere in this Union. And this will be necessary in the very trying times that we find ourselves in and the bloody struggles that are to come. We need to understand a little history that started before most of you were born to understand the current struggle whose outcome will literally determine the future quality of our lives. The last 50 years have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to our Corporate Masters we also know as the 1% in the known history of the world. 

To illustrate this I want to tell you a little story about what life was like for the unionized working class in America when I graduated from highschool in 1972. We had problems for sure, like getting drafted and bleeding out for Corporate profit in some rice paddy in South Vietnam. But we also had opportunity that simply does not exist now. You could get your high school diploma and walk off the stage and the next day go to work building cars on an assembly line, working in heavy industry or refining, construction etc. In those days one salary on 40 hours a week would support a family of four, be able to buy a small house, a car, go on vacation each year for a couple of weeks and send your kids to college. The work was hard but that life existed in 1972 because of the strength of the labor movement and the blood sacrifices that were made in the decades prior. There were still huge problems for those not in a union and poverty was rampant but the conversations we were having were reducing the work week to 32 hours, retiring with a full pension at 55, providing income and housing and free higher education for all Americans and ensuring no one would go hungry or unhoused. 

The Corporate Masters fought back these last 50 years with their control of the two party system. Democrats and Republicans in a bipartisan manner destroyed this life. Now two jobs with overtime barely pays and sometimes not at all pays the bills. College and vacation are distant memories. All of the wealth that is created in the country is literally sucked up by the 1%. While the Democrats will eat us a little slower than the Republicans they do fiercely believe in only a two party system that always ensures one of them is in power. Our Corporate Masters love it because they own the majority of the Democratic Party and all of the Republican Party. 

While they have us arguing about immigrants, guns, affirmative action, and women with dicks and men with breasts and abortion rights for women they have picked our pockets clean and tightened their noose of corporate power around out necks so tightly that we can barely breathe. 

In this period union membership declined from 30% of the private sector to currently 6%. 

There has been a decline in real income for all workers when on average the American worker had stronger real incomes in the 1970s than they do today. 

Every dollar of wealth in this country the 1% has 30 cents, the bottom 50% has 2-3 cents and the rest of the 96% splits the 67 cents. This is a huge transfer of wealth. There is plenty of money in this country to feed, house, provide free health care and education and retire everyone at 55 in this country but it is concentrated by neoliberal public policy in the hands of the 1%. 

These horrifying statistics represent an all out assault on the American working class and reflect what happens when you eviscerate the private sector labor movement. 

There were turning points during this period that accelerated our decline. The election of Ronald Reagan who placed neoliberal program of the Democrats and Republicans on steroids. Let me give you some examples of what this means. Neoliberalism, in simple terms, is an economic and political theory that favors free markets and limited government intervention. It emphasizes the idea that markets are the most efficient way to allocate resources and create wealth. Key policies often associated with neoliberalism include deregulation, privatization, and reduced social welfare spending. It has produced a country of massive inequality, significantly reduced standards of living and economic uncertainty for most of us and obscene wealth for our rulers. 

Eight months after Ronald Reagan was elected there was the PATCO strike in August of 1981. Many of you were not even born yet and most probably are not even aware of this event. 

PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) was a union representing 13,000 federal air traffic controllers. Air traffic control work was stressful and often required long hours and the workers struck to correct these conditions. Despite being a federal union, PATCO had endorsed Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election believing he would be sympathetic to their cause. The union struck on August 3, 1981 despite federal law prohibiting strikes by government employees. The strike immediately disrupted flights nationwide. 

Reagan ordered controllers back to work within 48 hours citing national safety and illegality of the strike. When 11,345 controllers refused to return he fired them permanently and banned them from federal service. 

Labor historians mark the PATCO strike as the beginning of the modern era of weakened unions in the United States. It demonstrated that even a skilled, highly trained, and previously politically influential workforce could be defeated by coordinated state action. The balance in power in labor relations shifted decisively towards employers influencing U.S. workforce dynamics for decades. 

The real crime was the total capitulation of the leadership of the United States labor movement and their criminal class collaboration. Lane Kirkland and his Vichy roundtable of collaborators refused to stand up to strikebreaking and union busting and instead elected to lay on their back with all four paws in the air hoping to get a belly rub from our masters. If ever in this country a general strike was required it was in August of 1981. Instead they did not even call for a massive rally in DC after the firings. The following year in September 1982 the AFL CIO call for a Solidarity Rally to protest Reagan economic policies and the theme from the collaborating leadership was to register to vote. Over 500,000 angry trade unionists came to the rally making it one of the largest rallies in history and were sent home to vote. 

This brings us to the election of Donald Trump and his program to weaponize neoliberalism with total disregard for the rule of law and begin to build the structural foundations of fascism. He has done more to harm American workers in his first few months in office than any other President in history. His crimes against the American worker and fundamental democratic rights of all are to numerous to list here. These are very dark days for our movement and our working lives. How we respond to these conditions will determine the very quality and sometimes existence of our working lives and our fundamental freedoms. His acceleration of the wealth transfer on the backs of the sick and poor and working class can only be described as criminal.  

This is our PATCO moment. If you respond with wait and see and accommodation we will lose. Lawyers will not be able to file lawsuits to fix this problem. The Democratic Party has some good people in it who are worth supporting but the gerrymandered political system is controlled by the big money oligarches. The electoral path is necessary but not to be relied upon. 

The fascist formation under the MAGA banner that has control right now of government are busy criminalizing immigrants, medicare and medicaid recipients, homelessness and gay people and strengthening their white supremacist structures. Soon they will cancel the prevailing wage and seek to privatize public transportation. We will need to respond not with lawsuits and electing weak and feeble democrats but with strikes and massive civil disobedience. We should begin to make allies with the emerging people’s movements like the Nonviolent Medicaid Army, the Poor People’s Campaign and March on Harrisburg to name three of the many who we should support. 

The most important thing we can do right now is begin to establish self defense formations in every yard and section house and gang in our union. These self defense operations can begin to map out the weak points for battle and join the broader social struggles in their areas to prepare for the class war to come. They can train and educate themselves and the members they work with on the need to be prepared and to take action in the form of political strikes and civil disobedience against the government and our employers. It will take time but patience and solidarity and strength will be our foundation. Our employers fear self and independent organization of workers more than anything else. We need to start now and build these formations underground as committees in our local unions and in conjunction with members of the other crafts and with the highest levels of solidarity. 

Finally I want to say something about Union dues and then I will shut up. If you are the member who thinks that union dues are a cost benefit accounting where you pay dues and somehow you get higher wages, good benefits and rights on the job you are the problem and the reason we will lose this coming struggle. Unions are not an insurance company. You pay dues for the right to have voice in the Union as you prepare with your brothers and sisters to speak with one voice as you seek to advance our collective good. Now we must organize to take action as one to confront the greatest danger our movement and the American working class has faced in our lifetime. Dues don’t guarantee you anything except a voice in the struggle to defeat the attacks that are coming.

Thank you brothers and sisters.