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Congratulations to everyone who poured blood, sweat and tears into this election. You have won for working families a great opportunity—and a great responsibility.
We have the real opportunity to turn around America and get our economy back on the right track. We are responsible for holding our elected leaders to the promises they made during their campaigns and providing the public support they need to make tough legislative choices on our behalf.
So thank you for all your hard work educating and mobilizing voters—and don't stop now.
Now we have to tackle the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Hardworking families are losing jobs, homes, health care, retirement savings and hope. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been committed to rescuing Wall Street—but almost nothing has been done to rescue Main Street.
Resuscitating our economy is going to require a fresh partnership among government, business, communities and working families. It will require immediate new stimulus efforts to jump-start our economy—restructuring mortgages to keep people in their homes, extending unemployment assistance for jobless workers, aiding states so they can continue to provide vital public services and putting a down payment on job-creating infrastructure investments. Then we'll need to grow those investments in schools, roads, bridges and clean renewable energy for sustained economic growth, re-regulate our financial markets and reform America's broken health care system so no one has to choose between food and medicine or between life-saving treatment and bankruptcy.
But no matter what else we do to put our economy back to work, we will not succeed unless we also restore workers' freedom to bargain for a better life. To do that, we must enact the Employee Free Choice Act as the core of lasting economic recovery for working families.
Look at what happened in Election 2008—unity we never witnessed before made historic change possible. Hope in the face of economic crisis fueled bigger, broader, more passionate participation in our democratic process. Commitment to put our country back on the right track created tens of thousands of new activists.
We have to keep that drive alive. We have to remain just as passionate and committed until we have truly turned around America. I urge you to join us.
John J. Sweeney
International President, AFL-CIO |