Note: This is an address made to a gathering of more than 500 leaders from American Federation of Government Employees local unions and councils where policy issues are discussed.� Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the Director of Field Services & Education for AFGE.� The speech was delivered on Sunday, February 21st.

Good afternoon and thank you.� I am very honored to have been asked to address this conference.

I want to begin by giving a very special thanks to the Creator of all things on this, the 21st birthday of my little girl.�� So, I hope to do her proud.

I am going to be brutally honest with you, so I ask your forgiveness in advance if my remarks unsettle you.

The union movement is in a rut.� Too many of the leaders of organized labor seem to have forgotten certain historical truths.� Let me remind you of one such truth.

In 1857 a great leader in the struggle for justice offered the following observations:

�Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

He went on to say:

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.� [from Frederick Douglass]

We, in organized labor, seem to get confused as to the difference between �requests� and �demands�.� We sometimes think that they are the same.� THEY ARE NOT.

Let me give you an example of requests:� �Pass the jelly, please.�� OR, �May we meet with you, Mr. President.�

How about demands?� Let me pick one out of the air:� �MR. PRESIDENT:� WE WANT TSOs TO HAVE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING RIGHTS NOW!� Not tomorrow�not next week!�

A demand is straight forward.� It does not equivocate.� It may or may not be your end point, but it is something in which you strongly believe and it is your starting position.� The demand guides your action.� One follows through on demands.

Let us be clear that we in the union movement made a big mistake in how we understood the November 2008 elections.�� Yes, we were sick of Bush.� Yes, we realized how dangerous the McCain/Palin ticket was.� After all, had McCain/Palin won, they had not even the semblance of an economic program and as many commentators have noted, we probably would be in a barter economy at this point, not to mention, probably involved in a military conflict with Iran.

But we made a particular mistake.� We engaged in magical thinking and wishful thinking.�� Yes, Obama was the right person to elect, but he was not a miracle maker.� He is an outstanding thinker and speaker.� He was and is also someone who is very tied into corporate America and he is someone who seems to have an irresistible impulse to approach matters of controversy by jumping to the middle position and believing that a consensus can be built.� Rather than staking out a position that he believes in and fighting for it, he moves quickly to a center piece assuming that we are all big boys and girls and can agree midpoint.

Yet in today�s political situation, there is no real bi-partisanship, and not because Obama has not tried.� The Republicans have made it clear that they want to cut his legs off.� Not just cut his legs off, but hang and guillotine him at the same time!!� Think about the irrationalist attacks on him carried out by the so-called Birther Movement, a movement claiming that President Obama is not actually a citizen of the USA.�� 58% of the Republican Party actually believes that he was either not born in the USA or that there is enough evidence to raise doubts, this despite the fact that he has provided proof again and again, and despite the obvious fact that every intelligence agency in every country around the world would have been investigating his background from the minute that he became a candidate for the Presidency of the USA.� Consider that some people are using this irrationalism as their organizing approach toward members of the military to incite a coup d��tat against Obama.� Think about the allegations that Obama is a socialist despite the fact that he surrounds himself with economic advisers from Wall Street!� Added to this, Republicans are being clear that there is NOTHING that Obama says, including and not limited to THEIR own proposals, to which they will agree.

Yet, Obama seems to feel more compelled to respond to that, than to pay attention to the likes of us.� And his reluctance to lead the charge on behalf of working people is as much driven by his ties to corporate America as it is to something that will be very uncomfortable for many of you to hear:� his fear of being perceived by white Americans as an angry Black man.

Workers have been under attack since the early 1970s, and organized labor in many countries�not just the USA�has been unable to alter its approach as to how to respond.� Yet there are examples that are noteworthy of people fighting back.

The little island of Guadeloupe has an unemployment rate of 23%.� We complain�justifiably�about a 10% unemployment rate, but Guadeloupe has a rate that is depression level.�� In addition they have a high cost of living.� Yet, in this situation in early 2009, the workers of this island, in response to continued attacks carried out a 44 day general strike against further cuts and against this economic atrocity.�

THEY WON!!� Not only did they win, but they won and inspired workers in France to resist.

In Greece, workers fought back against attacks.� They stood up and resisted.

Here at home, our response to the economic crisis has been nothing short of anemic�at best.� When the financial collapse took place in the fall of 2008, organized labor did almost nothing.���

With the rise of this Administration organized labor was excited about the possibility of passing the Employee Free Choice Act as a way of increasing the right of workers to join or organize unions.� Yet, instead of taking this issue to the public, organized labor basically kept this within the Beltway and made little effort to connect this to the issues that working people�whether union or not�face every day; in other words, as crazy as it may sound, they did not connect EFCA to economic justice.� Other movements have also been very passive.� They AND WE have waited for the person who far too many people have come to believe to be the greatest magician on the planet�President Obama�to resolve everything.� And, while we sit back and wait for the magic to unfold, the political Right has been carrying out a full-scale assault, twisting recent history to serve their objectives, conveniently forgetting how the budget deficit came to be; and how we came to be in two wars.

Change does not come from one person.� But it also does not come from patiently requesting change.� We have to realize that elected leaders are bombarded by various forces, and particularly forces that have far more money and other resources than do we.� This, then, goes beyond the matter of good intentions, good speeches, and good looks.� It goes to matters of power�who has it�who wants it�and how it is used.

So, in the face of the fact that the Obama administration has not delivered many of the changes that we have requested, there has been both anger and despair, but what there has been so little of�particularly from unions and pro-worker/pro-community organizations�has been a mobilization to insist upon our demands.

There is a story that has been told since the election of President Obama that sheds light on what we are doing and what we are not doing.� Actually the story goes back to the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt, around 1939/1940.� The story is that the great trade union and African American movement leader A. Philip Randolph met with FDR.�� Randolph met with him to lay out various reforms that he wanted and felt that FDR should push through.� FDR listened patiently and when Randolph was finished, he said to him:� �I agree with you.� Now, go out there and ORGANIZE and make me do it.�

MAKE �EM DO IT!!� That should be our slogan and that is precisely the direction that we should be moving.� In fact, the story does not end there because Randolph took FDR to task.� In early 1941 Randolph and many other African American leaders�and their allies�were deeply concerned that the growing war industry remained almost totally racially segregated.� Randolph went to FDR and asked for an executive order to ban this segregation.� FDR, deeply worried about conservatives within the Democratic Party, balked.� He asked Randolph to be patient.� Randolph came back at him and told him that he would organize a march of 10,000 people on Washington if something was not done.

Think about that.� This was 1941.� There were not a lot of marches on DC.� And here was this labor leader threatening such a march�ON HIS FRIEND.� Not only that, but it was 1941.� The Nazis were moving into the former Yugoslavia and preparing to invade the USSR.� What could have been a worst time to protest, to embarrass a standing President, many people asked.

FDR asked his wife Eleanor to approach Randolph and appeal to him to call off the demo.� Randolph listened patiently.� His response:� Thank you.� We are now going to march 100,000 people on Washington.

FDR ultimately blinked and when he blinked he issued the famous executive order that desegregated the war industry and laid the basis for events that would unfold over the next thirty years.

This is not personal.� This is about power.� And it is about taking on those whose legs wobble in the face of the goliath of corporate America.� This is about saying to our so-called friends that we are not interested in being taken for granted.� We are not interested in being the shock troops for change, only to sit back and see our hopes evaporate.

No, this does not put us on the same side as the likes of a Palin or others who would take us back to the mythical 1950s�at best.� But it means that we are not prepared to rest easy and to rest quietly.� We will be heard.

You know, there are those who say that the response of workers to inconsistencies and unfulfilled promises from the Obama administration and from the Congress will be that workers will stay at home in November.� While that may be true, that is not a strategy.� It is also one that makes no strategic sense.�� There is a lot at stake in November. I fear the growth of movements that are based on irrationality, and so should you.� I fear the election of those who would worsen our economic and political situation and take our civil liberties away.� No, sitting at home is no strategy.

But herein lies one more lesson from the administration of FDR.��

FDR�s first year was not so great.� He was not particularly visionary and he basically did not shake the table.� But he ran into problems that he did not expect.� Many of the great corporate leaders and their political allies attacked FDR for even his minimal efforts to address the Depression through some increased benefits.� In fact, they attacked him as being a traitor to his class (because he was from the wealthy) and there were right-wing papers and radio commentators who regularly called him a Bolshevik, socialist, and everything else but being a child of God, going so far as to conduct discussions regarding a coup against FDR.

FDR was caught.� What could he do?� Well, by the second year of his Administration workers were rebelling around the country.� The unemployed were organizing and unionized workers carried out three major general strikes plus a national textile strike.� You see, the workers did not wait for FDR.� They helped to transform FDR.� They realized that the change that they wanted�the change that they believed in�would only happen through THEIR own actions.� They looked to FDR to assist them, and they especially looked to FDR to not oppose them�but they did NOT look to FDR to do it for them.

They made him do the right thing.

We must make our so-called friends do the right thing.� We must make �em do it.� If we want genuine healthcare reform, make �em do it.� If we want a jobs program, make �em do it.� And if we want collective bargaining for TSOs, we must make �em do it.

We cannot let the obstructionism of the Republicans, or the complacency of the Democrats, get in our way. We must let no one, and I mean NO ONE, turn us around.

The lessons from history are there and they are clear.� It is now up to us to seize the time and realize the hope that was expressed in the 2008 elections.� Despair has no place in our present or our future.� It never has�and never will

What should be our clarion call, AFGE?� MAKE �EM DO IT!!!!

Thank you.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.