'We Will Fight for Our Future.'
President McEntee brings delegates to their feet with a message of courage and strength.
In his keynote address President McEntee outlined the challenges confronting the union and called on Convention delegates to give AFSCME the resources it needs to fight for working people into the 21st century. The following is an excerpt from his speech.
It has been 24 years since AFSCME last came to Hawaii for a Convention. Since then, we have doubled our membership to become a union of 1.3 million members. Out of the last 24 years, the last two have been rather exceptional and unique with the mounting challenges and our responses to them including privatization and extremist political attacks on working families.
In Chicago at our last Convention, we anticipated that our opponents weren’t going away. We appointed the Task Force on the Future to address the challenges before us.
This group tackled serious and important issues head on and worked to come up with a vision, a strategy your union could embrace as we move into the 21st century. The task force found that there were common threats that the union faces whether you’re from Alaska or Florida, threats like corporate greed. Threats like political attacks on working families.
But it’s one thing to understand the threats that face us, quite another to learn to deal with them.
For many years, in our AFSCME culture, we left organizing mostly to the International union. And for years, that worked fine. But despite our great successes, our union is no longer growing. In the last three years we organized over 100,000 people. In that same period of time we lost 104,000 members. So we had a net loss of 4,000.
How did we lose them? Cutbacks, layoffs, downsizing, buyouts, attrition. Politicians aggressively slashing government from top to bottom.
To continue to win our battles, we must change the culture of organizing. Organizing cannot be seen as just a function of the International union alone. Organizing must be a cooperative effort across all levels of our union: locals, councils, all of you sisters and brothers.
We also must create a culture around fighting privatization. Politicians and corporations alike have gone after our jobs, trying to privatize prisons, sanitation services, and entire welfare programs.
The most menacing threat our union faces in this and other fights is the threat of extremist politics.
Because of Labor ’96, one-quarter of all the people who voted in that election were union members or came from union households — the first time that ever happened in the history of America.
That success was duly noted by the radical right; and whether you feel it or not, you have a bounty on your heads. All of them want us out of the way because they know that we are a force to be reckoned with at the ballot box.
You know very well that it takes money to keep the fight going. By raising the per capita tax 50 cents in 1999 and again in 2000, we will have the resources to make strides in organizing, to ensure that your union remains a clean union, to fight privatization wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head, and to continue the battle with extreme politicians who want nothing more than to silence this union.
In AFSCME, we are united. We are one together. We will protect our members. We will protect our values, and by God, we will fight for our future.
