Remarks by John J. Sweeney
President of the AFL-CIO

Thank you, Elliott [Milstein] for those kind words and for inviting me to be with you today --- I’m flattered that you chose me as your speaker at your convention as president of the AALS, and I hope I can measure up to your introduction.

It is a great pleasure to join all of you as we start the new year and a new millennium, and I offer my congratulations to your incoming president --- Mary Kay Kane --- and to your entire executive committee for the terrific work you are doing.

As Elliot mentioned, I’m fortunate to have his sister, Merrilee, as a top member of my staff and I want everyone to know that Elliot’s incredible contribution to the cause of equal access to justice is matched by what she gives to the labor movement --- we’re all far better off for the two of them. It is ironic, however, that while Elliot probably spends a good deal of his time teaching law students how to get people out of jail, Merrilee spends a lot of her time teaching young union organizers how to go to jail.

Elliott, I hope your students are good at what you teach them, because Merrilee’s pupils are tops at what they do --- and God knows, we need them all.

This is my first public address since what we Irish-Americans have come to call “the troubles in South Florida,” and I want to begin with a few comments about what happened between November 7th and December 13th.

During the 36 days before five justices of the Supreme Court brought our electoral process to an abrupt and premature close, reporters were searching back before the turn of the last century for comparisons.

But they were looking in the wrong place: for workers who’ve tried to gain union representation in their workplaces through Labor Board elections, the situation looked frighteningly familiar.

During union election campaigns, workers regularly face harassment and intimidation - just as older, minority and student voters in South Florida did.

And while the press proclaimed an impending constitutional crisis because of the lack of finality for 36 days after the November 7th general election , it is absolutely routine for workers to face periods of legal limbo far in excess of 36 days after they win elections.

In 1999, a group of 5,000 workers at Avondale shipyards just outside New Orleans finally had their votes counted and their election certified six long years after they cast their ballots -- and that’s just one example.

Following a union election, you see, labor law permits the filing of objections which must be adjudicated before the results are certified. Certification itself carries no compulsion, so employers normally refuse to respect the results, drag the process out even more, and force the Labor Board to cite them for refusal to bargain with the workers’ chosen union representative and to seek enforcement of its order in a court of appeals.

Mr. Bush should consider himself lucky that the litigation over the voting irregularities and recount in Florida didn’t keep running through his entire four-year term --- that’s what happens in many union elections.

And what about the union supporters who, as Harvard professor Paul Weiler has documented, are illegally fired during one out of every five union elections? Because the Labor Board is underfunded and overworked, it often takes even longer for those workers to get their jobs back.

Many commentators condemned the resort to litigation in the Gore-Bush dispute, and others criticized the clearly partisan conclusion of the litigation, but union organizers could be forgiven for seeing it as a fair contest, as compared to what they face in every representation election.

For instance, what if only one of the candidates --- only Mr. Bush or only Mr. Gore --- had been able to request judicial review of the Florida certification? That’s what we face in union elections --- only an employer can gain judicial review of Board certification of election results.

Did Vice President Gore get a fair shake in a state where Mr. Bush’s brother controls the election machinery? I think not --- but what if Governor Bush had literally owned the State of Florida?

That is precisely what workers face because the Labor Board almost always conducts union elections on the employer’s premises during the work day.

Employers literally own the ground the workers stand on when they vote, pay them for their time in voting, and have the sole right to speak the last word to them before they vote.

Vice President Gore should consider himself lucky he was allowed to cross the border from Georgia on election day --- union organizers are almost always excluded from company grounds while workers are voting -- and in fact, throughout the entire campaign, as Professor Jack Gertman and others among you have so aptly described.

I don’t want to diminish the injustices done to elderly and minority voters in South Florida, or, for that matter to Mr. Gore or to our nation --- the election was a travesty.

But it was a public and well-publicized travesty and our election system will never be the same. I hope there’s going to be a tremendous wave of election reform all across our country and believe me, the labor movement will be leading it.

By contrast, injustices heaped on workers during union elections in this country are largely private tragedies, all but hidden from the public eye. And that’s why we’ve made it a central task of the AFL-CIO to educate leaders like all of you about how American labor law works, or rather, doesn’t work.

We need your support --- personally and professionally --- to help shine a light on the weaknesses of our labor laws and the abuse of workers’ rights by employers. In the end, fairness of elections is guaranteed not by law and certainly not by judges, but by the active involvement of an informed citizenry. We need your involvement now more than ever -- and I’ll say more about that in a minute.

The reason is clear. Over the next four years, we do not foresee the democratic rights of workers being vigorously enforced by the Executive Branch, much less extended in a deadlocked Congress, or jealously safeguarded by the current majority on the United States Supreme Court.

Our aim is to broaden the discussion of workers’ rights beyond individual workplaces and outside the narrow confines of the Labor Board and the courts.

It was a very different Supreme Court that recognized over 60 years ago in Thornhill vs. Alabama that a broad discussion of workers’ right to a voice at work is, and I quote, “indispensible to the effective and intelligent use of the processes of popular government to shape the destiny of modern industrial society.”

On the subject of courts, I also want to urge all of you in this room to take an increased interest in the approval of nominees to the Supreme Court and to our appellate courts. Our nation has always relied heavily on the legal profession and especially legal academia to help prevent unfit individuals from serving on the federal bench, and we need more of your vigilance and informed judgment.

And none of us should ever again listen to the line that the politics of a nominee shouldn’t matter --- in Bush vs. Gore, the Scalia majority proved that politics always matters.

I am hopeful that the shameful events that took place in South Florida will awaken our society to several awful problems.

The first, of course, is the sorry state of our election systems, procedures and safeguards.

Tens of thousands of voters in Florida and in many other states were disenfranchised because their names couldn’t be found on the voter lists, or because they couldn’t make heads or tails of confusing ballots, or because antiquated voting machines malfunctioned, or because their over counted or undercounted ballots were never examined to determine intent.

Post-election complaints have poured in from Oregon, Texas, Georgia, Illinois --- even my hometown, New York City, where Chinese-language ballots were incorrectly translated and voters in Chinatown given faulty ballot instructions.

The experiences of those voters compel us to undertake election reform on a sweeping scale and I am hopeful we can build a bipartisan coalition that will get the job done before the next federal elections take place.

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not the best source on what is constitutional and what is not. But when it comes to voting equipment, ballot design, voter instruction and sample ballot distribution, poll worker training, ballot security, voter eligibility, absentee ballot systems and recount procedures, we need tough, national standards.

Never again should a voter face disenfranchisement or discouragement because of problems that can and should be solved --- in a real democracy, every vote should count and we must count every vote.

A compounding problem brought to light by the voting irregularities in Florida and in other states should alarm us even more than the need for election reform.

I’m talking about the hydra-headed serpent of discrimination we just don’t seem to be able to slow, much less slay.

Voters in white, middle and upper income precincts didn’t encounter harassment and intimidation by police and poll officials. They didn’t have their ballots invalidated by junky voting equipment, they didn’t arrive at the polls only to be turned away because their names weren’t on the list, and they weren’t unable to get help when they couldn’t understand instructions.

Those incidents took place by the tens and tens of thousands, but they took place almost entirely in minority and low-income precincts, or in precincts where elderly voters or student voters were in the majority.

The irregularities didn’t eliminate the ballots of the middle class, they stole the votes of African-Americans, Haitian-Americans, Asian-Americans, students and senior citizens.

What we saw in Florida and in other parts of the country wasn’t just the ordinary imperfections of a large-scale election -- it was a national disgrace.

I wish I could tell you that the discrimination that took place in the elections was a rare phenomenon.

It wasn’t. Just as workers trying to form unions encounter undemocratic, unfair elections every day, the powerless in our society are denied equal access to justice every day.

That means that if you are young, or old, or sick, or poor or black or brown, you are likely to be unable to defend yourself against racial profiling, you can’t sue your landlord when your drains don’t work, you can’t file a complaint against an employer who fails to pay you overtime wages, you can’t fight back against a boss who demands sexual favors or who cracks down on union organizing by threatening to turn you in to the INS.

And God forbid you should enter our criminal justice morass and come to depend upon a patchwork system of pro bono representation and public defense that just isn’t working anymore.

The truth is, in our country we have twin pits of despair that are threatening to swallow the incredible economic and social progress we’ve made as a society.

One is our wage and wealth gap --- we have a greater disparity of income and wealth than any other industrialized nation, and it’s a gap that is growing bigger and destroying hope as it nurtures envy, anger and hatred.

The other is a justice divide that yawns wider every day.

As Elliott Milstein told this audience in his presidential address last year, “Even though we do a better job than ever at educating our students about justice, civil rights, human rights and the relationship between racism, sexism, homophobia and injustice .... we have failed to ensure that victims and potential victims of injustice and arbitrary action have access to legal advice or representation.”

In a very great sense, our national “wage and wealth gap” and our “justice divide” are one and the same --- they are both giant wounds that have been opened by a virulent new strain of social Darwinism that has taken hold in our country and we must close one if we are to close the other.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would close the wage and wealth gap by reforming our labor laws and guaranteeing every worker the absolute right to join or form a union with no interference from his or her employer.

That’s because union representation is still the single most effective way for working families to lift themselves up and take for themselves a fair share of the prosperity they create.

And if I had a magic bottle, I would rub it and have a Genie close the justice divide by refunding and unshackling our Legal Services Program --- equal access to justice is a fundamental right and it is the job of our Federal government to guarantee that right.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic wand or a magic bottle.

What we have instead is a “compassionate conservative” in the White House and as far as I can tell from the appointments he’s made, that means he is exceedingly compassionate towards conservatives.

With all due respect to Governor Bush’s stated intentions, those of us who care about the freedom to join a union and equal access to justice can’t expect much help from the new administration.

That means we’re going to have to do the job ourselves --- without the protection of new and better labor laws, without the benefit of federal funds or support and, most likely, in the face of active opposition.

At the AFL-CIO, we’re fighting to bring the benefits of union membership to hundreds of thousands of low-income, minority and immigrant families through our “Voice at Work” campaign, which aims to protect the freedom of working men and women to have a “voice at work” by mobilizing public opinion and community backing.

We’re getting tremendous support from student bodies and academic communities at colleges and universities throughout the country, and I implore all of you to help bring our law schools into the struggle --- we want and need your help in closing the wage and wealth gap. And there are a host of immeasurably valuable actions you can take.

You can volunteer to serve on workers’ rights boards in your communities - boards that become a fair and outside arbiter of what happens to workers when they struggle to join together.

You can author white papers as Tom Juravich at U. Mass did recently to help document the unbelievable but customary employer tactics that render the right to organize so illusory for workers.

You can write OpEds for your local newspapers on these issues.

You can offer congressional and state legislative testimony, which in the Bush administration will obviously be critical to defend ourselves.

And you can publish law review articles that can be cited by the labor bar when defending workers’ rights in court.

I know that AFL-CIO General Counsel Jon Hiatt will be meeting later this afternoon with those of you who are free to discuss the kinds of research and support that we believe would be helpful, and I want to extend my appreciation for your interest and assistance.

At the AALS, you are waging a battle not unlike our Voice at Work campaign to guarantee equal access to justice and I want you to know that the union movement is standing with you --- we share your concern for the poor and the dispossessed, and we are mindful that millions of our own members are also on the other side of the justice divide.

I hope that you will communicate regularly with us to let us know how we can be most supportive - and I look forward to a rich and mutually productive dialogue.

Working together, I am confident we can accomplish all of these things because I believe the American people share our values and concerns.

They believe, just as we believe, that all citizens should be able to seek and find equal justice under the law --- regardless of the color of their skin or the size of their pocketbook.

They believe, as we believe, that they best way to build a better America is by respecting work and strengthening families.

They believe -- and we believe -- that work should be safe and pay decent wages that improve the comfort and dignity of people’s lives and of their children’s lives.

That all our families should have health care we can afford.

That every child should be able to attend good public schools and write the future he or she deserves.

And that every worker should have an equal opportunity for a better life and the freedom to join together with others to guarantee it.

Thank you and God bless you all.

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