Thank you, brothers and sisters, and thanks to Zelda Robinson and Margaret Blackshere, who make the words to the preamble to our constitution come alive. Their spirit and the voices of the workers and the images in the video presentation remind us not only of the richness of our history and the sacrifices of our founders but of the values we share – the values of the members we serve today.

The milestones Margaret mentioned weren’t reached because of John Sweeney, they are markers we all reached together. And I’d like to thank my partners — Rich Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson — as well as our AFL-CIO Vice Presidents for leading us with commitment and dedication every step of the way.

And I also want to thank all of you — our delegates and activists from every corner of our country and every level of trade unionism. You are the warriors of our movement and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

The preamble to our AFL-CIO Constitution is a remarkable document. It is our compass – our manifesto – our mission statement – and its powerful words remind us of the many layers of responsibility we shoulder as leaders of our Federation.

And I promise you this: As long as I am president of the AFL-CIO, I’m going to work harder every day to live up to those responsibilities – not just some of them, not just the easy ones, but all of them.

Brothers and sisters, one of my greatest responsibilities as your President is to be honest with you when things go wrong, and this morning is one of those times. Despite the best efforts of a lot of good people, several of our largest unions have decided not to join us at this historic convention – this crucial convention.

I am deeply disappointed my own union is among them. One of the film clips you saw in the preamble presentation was from the 1936 strike that launched my union — SEIU Local 32BJ in New York City.

Those men and women literally had to kick their way into the AFL — the Federation didn’t want them because they were only lowly janitors and elevator operators. They got a charter, but the AFL revoked it after their first organizing campaign failed. But with the help of the typographers and the garment workers and dozens of other unions, they won a huge strike for recognition. Within 10 years they had 40,000 members and they became the flagship of SEIU – a sturdy financial and spiritual base for the leaders who followed.

After that history of struggle to get into the AFL, pulling out of our convention dishonors the founders and the members of my union.

It is a grievous insult to all the unions that helped us – and to the unions in this hall who came here to discuss and debate the difficult issues and make historic changes.

But most of all, it is a tragedy for working people. Because at a time when our corporate and conservative adversaries have created the most powerful anti-worker political machine in the history of our country, a divided movement hurts the hopes of working families for a better life.

And that makes me very angry — the labor movement belongs to all of us — every worker — and our future should not be dictated by the demands of any group or the ambitions of any individual.

But it is also my responsibility to hold our movement together – because our power is vested in our solidarity. So I want you to know I will overcome my own anger and disappointment and do everything in my power to bring us back where we belong – and that’s together.

Brothers and sisters, our past is filled with the sacrifice and nobility and courage of millions of men and women.

Like just about everybody in this hall, my local union gave me a chance to learn what it takes to win for working families — as a business agent, a district leader, then president of my local — as the leader of two citywide strikes.

Making things work for working people is what mattered to me then and now — and none of us should ever forget what our movement is all about — winning rewards for work, and respect for workers.

But we can’t afford to dwell in the past, because our future is crashing down upon us. And so this week I want us to celebrate not by walking down memory lane and dawdling in history, but by redirecting the course we are taking and making history.

For our union movement, the future is now, and the stakes have never been higher for working families.

For a single mother with one of our floundering airlines, what we do this week – the decisions we make – are not abstract considerations. For her and tens of thousands of airline workers, what we do may spell the difference between winning back their wages or losing more in a bankruptcy shell game.

For a young steelworker and his family in Cleveland, it can result in hanging onto his good paying, good benefit job, or having it shipped overseas.

For a retired auto worker in Florida, what we do this week may mean living with the dignity of a defined benefit pension plan or skimping by on Social Security alone.

And for a teenaged textile worker in Bangladesh, or El Salvador, or China, it could mean the difference between living free or dying in workplace servitude.

Today, all of us are living in a see-saw world that raises up corporate profits, CEO compensation and stock prices by pushing workers’ wages and benefits down.

The janitor trying to pay off a “franchise fee” in Seattle. The state employee in Pennsylvania. The grocery worker fighting off Wal-Mart in New York. The teacher struggling to pay off a student loan in Arizona. The computer worker being forced to train her replacement from India. They are all depending on us.

And we cannot — we must not — let them down.

Brothers and sisters, I believe our members and all working people are ready to stand with us and fight with us if we’re ready to lead them.

They know that something big, something chilling is going on in our country, and it isn’t something good for them. They are frustrated and disappointed and disgusted.

Voters are tired of being told that standing in line for eight hours is the American way.

Workers are tired of being told that shipping jobs overseas is progress and that standing in an unemployment line happens to everybody.

Immigrants are tired of standing in line to be denied rights and benefits they deserve.

Mothers and fathers are tired of standing in line to get their children into decent schools, and they are tired of standing in line at emergency rooms.

Working people in our country are tired of standing in line. But we don’t want to just help them go to the head of the line — the point is, in America – the richest country in the world – there should be no lines!

Brothers and sisters, these pressures have been building for the last 25 years, and they started hundreds of years before that. But we have only four days to make the decisions that will help us build the power to eliminate the lines of income and wealth that divide our nation and our world.

This afternoon, we will begin clearing a path to power by addressing one of our most serious shortcomings as a movement, and it’s not about structure or governance or mandates for organizing or bargaining: it’s about leadership.

For many years, we’ve worked together to paint a portrait of social progress with broad and powerful strokes of action. But when it comes to bringing the faces and cultures of our leadership into harmony with the diverse faces and cultures of our members we’ve barely picked up the brush.

Our actions towards achieving diversity just don’t match our words.

When it comes to fighting racism and sexism in America, we should be taking the field instead of just cheering from the sidelines.

So at this convention we’ll be approving more leadership training and development for women and people of color and increasing our outreach to younger workers. For the first time in our history, we will ask our national affiliates to sign a set of diversity principles and require annual reports. We will also require the AFL-CIO Executive Council as well as our state federations and central labor councils to develop plans to achieve targeted levels of diversity by the 2009 convention. And at that convention we will require that all delegations reflect the faces of their members!

We may disagree on many things during the next four days, but I hope none of us will disagree with our diversity proposals. I will ask for – and we should demand of ourselves – a vote of approval that is unanimous.

Brothers and sisters, once we’ve cleared away the obstacles to the leadership diversity we need, we’re going to ask you to approve some of the most radical reforms we’ve ever considered.

We will begin building the new power we need by approving a huge shift of AFL-CIO resources into organizing, so we can ratchet up strategic campaigns aimed at the likes of Wal-Mart, Comcast, Clear Channel, and Toyota – and so we can provide serious incentives to encourage our affiliates to invest more and work harder and smarter to bring in new members.

We will open up a new front on the enemies of working families by creating industry coordinating committees that will develop strategic organizing and bargaining plans and enforce contract standards.

And we will intensify our campaign to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and guarantee all workers the freedom to form or join unions.

We will also approve more enforceable rules governing organizing and jurisdictions, and we will approve a plan to double the size of our new community affiliate, so by 2006 Working America will have two million members.

Brothers and sisters, we will rise to the challenge of growth, yet we know organizing by itself will not win the war on working families — we also have to silence the guns of greed that are pounding away at working people and our unions.

We will substantially increase the resources we are putting into mobilizing our members for political and legislative action, and we will transform the way we do both. It is clear to me that we must build a year-round, year-in, year-out grassroots membership mobilization for legislation and politics.

Our enemies don’t take time outs, and from here forward neither will we.

We will change the rules of politics in our country by demanding that all office holders support working families and the freedom to join unions – and the ones who betray us will no longer be with us.

We will change the focus of our political work by mobilizing close to the ground – in our states and local communities – where we have the people-power to get our country moving on an upward path.

And to make it happen we will bring our state federations and labor councils from the back row to the front row in our march towards justice.

We will adopt strong measures to encourage full affiliation and funding for our state and local organizations and by holding ourselves accountable through standards of performance as we realign our grassroots movement.

We’ve had terrific success in states like New York and Colorado, where we’ve re-stacked the political deck in favor of working families — and in towns like Cleveland and Los Angeles, where we’re creating the hottest union cities in America.

For the LA miracle, we owe a huge debt to our brother Miguel Contreras. Miguel showed us how to create real power by bringing our unions and communities together with political action and organizing — and we will not soon forget him.

Miguel believed organizing and politics go hand-in-hand. We believe it and we will honor his memory and the spirit he stirred in us by expanding our state and local leadership development program and giving it a new name. It will be called “The Miguel Contreras Leadership Institute.”

Brothers and sisters, at this convention, we’ll be rededicating ourselves to building stronger alliances with union movements around the globe. We have awesome responsibilities as a leader of the world-wide labor movement, and we’re delighted that more than 200 leaders from other countries have come to watch us meet those responsibilities. I want to ask our international guests to stand and be recognized.

My friends, we have an intense week ahead of us and we have already been through many weeks that have strained our patience as well as our tolerance.

But I’m confident we will not lose sight of our goal of building power to demand that employers and politicians and policy-makers heed our call to reward work and respect workers.

We have a head-start on doing that because all across our country, workers are already fighting and winning struggles to form unions and reform our bankrupt political system.

In Houston, Texas, the Harris County AFL-CIO and UNITE-HERE linked arms, developed a political – legislative – organizing strategy, and helped workers at the Hilton Hotel become the first Houston hotel workers ever represented by a union.

Down in High Point, North Carolina the UAW – with the backing of the community and the state federation – took on the National Right to Work Committee, executed two brilliant and grueling campaigns and won a union for workers at Thomas Built Freightliner.

In Bangor, Maine, the Bangor Central Labor Council joined with the Teamsters to help workers at DHL organize – they energized the entire community to get two dozen fired workers their jobs back and today those workers are negotiating their first contract and setting the pace for campaigns at DHL all across the country.

In Colorado our state federation coordinated a multi-year campaign to take back control of state government for the first time in 40 years, and our political turnaround is helping all our unions win organizing and legislative victories.

On the West Coast the proud dockworkers of the ILWU – with Rich Trumka at the bargaining table and the help of the entire labor movement – beat back the most drastic concession demands in their history and resolved to repay their brothers and sisters by going wherever there is a fight — last fall that meant hitting the streets for political action in Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Arizona and New Mexico.

All across our country, canvassers for Working America broke records for recruitment and joined the fight to protect the minimum wage – and stop CAFTA – to secure health care and protect Social Security.

And right here in Chicago, hospital workers are carrying on the fight by organizing, strikers at the Congress Hotel are bringing their renegade employer surely to justice and all of labor is fighting together to stop Wal-Mart from pulling down this great city.

Some of these workers and leaders are with us this morning and I’m going to ask them to join me on stage so we can commend them for their courage and their commitment.

From the Thomas Built campaign – North Carolina state fed president James Andrews and Niels Chapman from the UAW.

Representing the victory at DHL – Jack McKay from the Bangor Central Labor Council.

From the Hilton Hotel victory, Richard Shaw from the Harris County CLC.

From the political wars in Colorado, Steve Adams from the Colorado AFL-CIO.

From the ILWU, President Jim Spinosa — Vice Presidents Robert McEllrath and Wesley Furtado – and Secretary-Treasurer William Adams.

Let’s also welcome all the record-breaking canvassers from Working America from Portland, Oregon.

And all the fighting workers who are with us from here in Chicago.

Brothers and sisters, these workers and leaders are what our movement is all about and this is what our convention is all about — fighting to build power and winning for working families.

Just as the delegates met 50 years ago and vowed to build a new labor movement for their hard times, let us commit to build a new movement for our hard times.

Let us disagree about how we build our power.

But let us come together and never forget that we seek it because of our shared commitment to overcoming injustice.

And let us proceed confidently knowing that we will overcome any obstacles because we care.

We care enough to fight for our members.

We care about our families and about working families here in our country and around the world.

Most of all, we care about each other, and that’s what creates the solidarity that is at the core of our movement and at the center of our lives.

We care and because we care we will confront our challenges and our challengers alike.

We will meet them with fight.

We will meet them with commitment.

We will meet them with courage.

We will struggle together – and stand together – and fight together – until we win together.

Thank you. God bless you all – God bless the AFL-CIO — and God bless America.