As president, Barack Obama has placed his faith in America’s working men and women to lead our country to economic recovery and to our full potential as a nation. With our endorsement today, we affirm our faith in him—and pledge to work with him through the election and his second term to restore fairness, security and shared prosperity.
The coming election is about values. President Obama honors the values of hard work, of mutual respect, and of solving problems together—not every person for himself or herself. He believes that together we will get through the most challenging economic crisis in memory and restore opportunity for all. Each of the Republican presidential candidates, on the other hand, has pledged to uphold the special privileges of Wall Street and the 1%--privileges that have produced historic economic inequality and drowned out the voices of working people in America.
President Obama took America from the brink of a second Great Depression by pressing Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which saved or created 3.6 million jobs. He championed comprehensive health insurance reform, which -- while far from perfect -- set the nation on a path toward health security that had eluded our country for nearly 100 years. He insisted upon Wall Street reform—passed over the objection of almost every Republican—that is now beginning to reverse decades of financial deregulation that put our entire economy at risk.
Although the labor movement has sometimes differed with the president and often pushed his administration to do more and do it faster, we have never doubted his commitment to working families. He has worked hard to create good jobs; he has made the revival of the manufacturing sector a hallmark of his jobs agenda; he has moved aggressively to protect workers’ rights, pay and health and safety on the job; he has worked for a fair resolution of the housing crisis and he put his confidence and administration unequivocally behind the workers and companies in the American auto industry—a move that saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and is helping to revive the economy now and for the future.
President Obama has earned the support of working people for a second term and today the AFL-CIO voted proudly and enthusiastically to endorse him for a second term.
The labor movement is the original social network—a working class social network—and this year the unions of the AFL-CIO will be mobilizing working people to come together to organize our neighborhoods door to door, powered by cutting-edge technology and old-fashioned energy. We will be running an independent program rooted not in parties or candidates but in helping working people build power, making informed decisions about which candidates at every level to work for based on records and issues.
