Presented by Ken Georgetti on Monday, 19 September 2011

(Check against delivery)

Sisters and Brothers, I am pleased to bring you greetings of solidarity from the Officers and 3.2 million workers who are members of the Canadian Labour Congress.

I know you will bear with me as I repeat these greetings in Canada's other official language.

Consœurs et confrères, c'est un honneur pour moi de vous transmettre les salutations de solidarité des dirigeantes et dirigeants et des 3,2 millions de travailleuses et travailleurs affiliés au Congrès du travail du Canada.

I want to welcome all of you not only to Canada and to Vancouver but to the city that is my home.

My thanks to your International President Ed Hill, and to International Vice-President for Canada Phil Flemming and your executive for inviting me to speak to you.

The IBEW is a key affiliated union in the Canadian Labour Congress and Phil is a valued member of our CLC Canadian Council.

The IBEW voice is always heard and it is always persuasive – thank you Phil!

And I know from my good friend Rich Trumka what a big role this great union plays in the labour movement in the United States.

With Rich, and the great work your own Liz Schuler is doing as part of the Trumka team – the AFL-CIO is in terrific hands and I am so very proud of the close relationship between the CLC and the AFL-CIO!

You know, I notice in your IBEW guide to the Convention, Vancouver is described by the New York Times as "Manhattan with mountains.”

After the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in Game 7 and what took place here, we are more inclined to describe our city as: “Rome with rioters or London with looters!”

Now, I am President of the CLC but I am also a pipefitter by trade.

I started my working life as a hard rock miner in the Rocky Mountains.

And I can tell you that it’s amazing how working underground all day in a tough, hot, dangerous job makes you think constantly about learning a trade! 

So I talked to a pipefitter one day and asked him: “What do I need to know to get my ticket?”

“Son,” the pipefitter said to me with a big smile. “There’s really only three things a pipefitter needs to know – crap flows downhill, don't eat anything with your fingers and payday is every second Friday!”

With that excellent advice I soon became a pipefitter.

Unfortunately the one thing I’ve learned since I became president of the Canadian Labour Congress is that while payday is still every second Friday, the crap in my job now flows uphill, not downhill!

I just knew I should have become an electrician!

Your theme for this IBEW convention in Canada – is “Brotherhood Beyond Borders.”

I couldn't agree more.

Because for union members, both good things – like our solidarity – and bad things – like attacks on labour – easily cross our borders.

We in Canada know all too well about the fight in Wisconsin and in other states over fundamental labour rights.

We know about bitter strikes and lockouts because of outrageous employer concession demands on pensions and wages.

And we know all about governments slashing needed public services.

Another thing that knows no borders is greed.

Once again, the world is being rocked by yet another stock market meltdown – the second in just three years and the fourth since 1999.

The reason is the same each time – the insatiable greed of the super-rich, including the CEOs who make more money in a half a day than your members make in a year.

The reason is governments who only listen to big business – and not working people.

They refuse to regulate financial markets to avoid such disasters.

And the results are also the same each time: working people and the poor around the world pay the price for financial meltdowns caused by greed.

Millions of workers lose their jobs.

Billions of dollars in pension funds and retirement savings for ordinary people simply vanish.

You and I know this is all true – because it’s so obvious.

But big business around the world is very, very nervous right now.

That’s because one of their own has become a traitor to his class – the super-rich.

Warren Buffett was the wealthiest man in the entire world in 2008. He’s still number 3 today – worth $50 billion.

And guess what Buffett said last month to governments?

“Stop coddling the super-rich.”

That’s a direct quote.

Billionaire Buffett actually wants higher taxes imposed on the wealthy.

You know – I think I’m going to make him an honorary officer of the Canadian Labour Congress!

“Brother” Buffett sounds pretty good to me!

Here’s the key thing Buffett said – and it applies to Canada as well as to the United States:

“While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.”

Buffett should know – he makes $40 million a year.

But he only pays 17.4% of his income in taxes – that’s outrageous!

Not one person in this room pays that low an income tax rate!

But Warren Buffett isn’t the exception – he’s the rule – because the rich make money from money – not from an honest day’s work like your members.

We might foolishly think that in Canada we don’t let the rich get away with this kind of stuff.

Think again.

The head of one of Canada’s largest cable TV companies – Shaw Communications CEO Jim Shaw – recently retired at just 53 years old.

Shaw will collect a pension that pays him $16,000.

Not $16,000 a year.

That would be a lot more than the average benefit of our universal public pension plan here in Canada – the Canada Pension Plan – of just $6,000 a year.

Not $16,000 a month. That would be $192,000 a year – or 4 times more than the average Canadian worker makes.

No, Jim Shaw will retire on $16,000 a day – every single day.

That’s $6 million a year – for the rest of his life.

He makes the maximum yearly Canada Pension Plan benefit every 17 hours!

And yet Shaw and his super-rich CEO friends tell the Canadian Labour Congress to forget about our plan to dramatically improve the Canada Pension Plan so every Canadian can retire with dignity and security after a lifetime of work.

Now, it appears in the United States, President Obama has taken some of Warren Buffet's words to heart.

On the weekend he announced a new tax on American millionaires – a tax that the Republican Party immediately declared to be class warfare.

So let me get this straight.

Republicans holding teachers, social workers, auto workers, pilots, flight attendants, and tradespeople like you responsible for the economic mess the banks and the obscenely rich created is not class warfare.

But making the obscenely rich pay their fair share to fix the problem they created is class warfare.

You know, it's kind of like pretending the obscenely rich are like a piñata – someday they will get so rich that the piñata will just explode and we can pick up the candy that falls out.

But one thing the rich and their political masters forget – to break open a piñata you have to beat it with a stick.

My friends, the reality is simple – we are in a class war right now.

That war was quietly declared by the upper class and big business against the ordinary working people who we represent.

Because it's a war we must win if our labour movement is to survive.

This is a diversionary war – a tactic designed to confuse us, to divide us and then to conquer us.

When big business and the right-wing tell us workers in Canada and the United States have to take wage cuts and that governments must slash public services – it’s a lie.

When big business and the right-wing tell us America and Canada are going broke – it’s a lie.

What they don’t tell you is that just 400 rich Americans – like Warren Buffet – own as much combined wealth as half of all Americans – 155 million of them.

I think it's about time we declare war - on this insatiable greed that is wrecking economies the world over!

Our countries aren’t broke – it’s simply that the rich want to break our unions!

When big business tries to pit union workers against non-union workers they are up to no good.

When big business encourages private sector unions to oppose public sector workers – they want to divide and conquer all union members.

Tell me – was it IBEW members who caused the world stock market crash?

Did anyone here take billions in bonuses while killing millions of jobs?

If it wasn’t IBEW members, was it teachers or nurses, postal workers, or pipefitters who did all that?

No. Of course not.

But our opponents have managed to turn the tables and have workers fighting with each other for a shrinking slice of the pie, while they take all the money in the economy for themselves.

The truth of the matter is this – Canadians and Americans are being played…with a bait and switch game.

And unions have been framed by our opponents.

In Canada, as in the United States, those responsible for the economic crisis are trying to blame the victims.

They want to roll back the hard-fought gains unions have made for their members.

We have to fight back.

We have to be smarter in fighting these threats.

When they try to frame us, we have to fight fiction with facts.

Fight fiction with facts – by using social media – like Twitter and Facebook and blogs and texting and the Internet.

In the U.S., you also have to fight Fox News with facts! That will confuse them!

I said at the Canadian Labour Congress Convention in May that labour can’t be playing 8-tracks...and expect to organize workers listening to Podcasts on their iPhones!

It’s true – we have to be more relevant to our members – and to the public.

We have to do more talking to the public through unfiltered media where our direct message can be heard – because we have a compelling story to tell about the union advantage.

We have a satisfaction rate and a loyalty among our members that unmatched by any company – we do such a good job for our members that our polling shows 70% of union members are satisfied with their unions.

And so we need to engage them more to tell the union story more widely.

And that’s one of the key ways we are going to get out of this mess and win the war being waged against us.

We also have to use political action.

In the recent Canadian election the CLC managed to put labour’s agenda in the national spotlight.

Labour forced every party to respond to workers’ needs for retirement security and much more.

Put simply – Canadian workers cannot be ignored any longer by political parties, because we represent a large segment of voters – and we make that count.

We also work with the New Democratic Party – the NDP – labour’s partner in Canada – because of their strong commitment to the union movement.

And for the first time in their history, the NDP are now the Official Opposition – the second largest party in Parliament.

Sadly, our party's leader Jack Layton died of cancer shortly after that amazing election, as many here know.

But his legacy…will live on.

We will continue the work he left, to bring more than just hope for a better future for all Canadians.

We will succeed in that task.

We all know that we face challenging times ahead.

But the key to our success is the same as it has always been for the labour movement – talk to our members.

We have to educate our local executives, activists and stewards to engage our members with our own message.

And we need every union member’s help to get these simple messages across:

“That lifting up the standard of living for everyone is a good thing.”

You know those three letters GDP?

Well, that's nothing more than a measurement of people spending their money.

And we're not going to be able to grow our economies if we don't stop the growing gap between the rich and the rest of us.

We need every union member's help to get out the message that being in a union means earning a decent wage so that we can buy a home, a car, raise a family, take a vacation, put our kids through college, and after a lifetime of work, be able to retire in dignity.

Unions are the way we achieve all these great things – so we should publicly celebrate our unions and be proud of all we do – all that you do – for workers and for their families.

So when we talk to our members, when we fight fiction with facts, when we give them the strong message of the union advantage – then brothers and sisters, we will win.

Thank you for listening and for all you do to make this a better world.