By LILLIAN ROBERTS
Executive Director
District Council 37, AFSCME

This is a crucial time for our union and for the entire American labor movement. Our values, our wallets and the social safety net we have built over the last 70 years are under attack. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — Labor played a key role in creating them and fighting for them. Now we’re defending them with all our might.

The Bush administration is pushing through a federal budget that locks in huge tax breaks for the rich, slashes education and health-care funding for the middle class and the poor, and hangs a record debt burden around the necks of our children and grandchildren. Working families pay for the war in Iraq with continual cutbacks at home as well as the lives of their brave sons and daughters.

The threat goes beyond economics: The national Republican Party — under right-wing leadership and in control of all three branches of government — is now poised to wipe out environmental protections, change longstanding Senate rules to stifle the minority and ram through extremist federal judges, and cripple collective bargaining, labor’s main way of winning fair wages and decent working conditions.

With obvious coordination from the White House, public workers’ bargaining rights and contracts have been revoked in Kentucky, Indiana and Missouri. California “Terminator” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to destroy the public employee pension system, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is busy butchering federal civil service rules and bargaining rights for 750,000 government workers.

It’s time we see the whole picture and realize that President Bush has declared war on working class people. We have to understand this, so we can mobilize the mightiest fightback ever and stop this administration from ruining our jobs, our lives and our country.

Bush’s real plan: destroy Social Security
His most concentrated attack is aimed at Social Security. Bush has used the distortions of a demagogue — scare tactics (the system is going broke); the big lie (no cuts in benefits); and divide and conquer (women and African Americans should support privatizing because the current set-up is unfair; seniors should not care about future benefit cuts that will hit only others).

The president’s real goal is not only to help out his Wall Street friends with the private investment accounts. And it’s certainly not to fix the minor funding problems that will show up decades from now. He recently admitted that private accounts will not fix anything. Make no mistake about it. Bush’s real plan is to destroy Social Security — the most successful government program in history — because it shows what working people can accomplish when we unite.

The battle over privatizing Social Security is a struggle for the soul of America, a fundamental dispute over what kind of society we should have.

The president stands for a dog-eat-dog world, dominated by business and the wealthy, with ever-lower taxes for them and shriveled benefits and public services for the rest of us.

We stand for a nation that provides quality education, quality health care, and enough jobs so people of all races, genders and national origins can earn a living in dignity. We believe in a country that cares for its weakest, sickest and poorest. We stand for hard work, community, and just distribution of the good things of life.

These are core American values, and we will fight to defend them.

Labor must be united to fight back
In this growing battle for a fairer world, organized labor is the only force that can provide the leadership and the strength to unite the communities that are under attack — minorities and immigrants, working people and the unemployed, the middle-class and the poor.

We must accept this responsibility to our members and to all who suffer under right-wing rule. We must understand that we are in a dire situation and put aside the divisiveness that weakens us. Only a united labor movement can meet the challenge of standing up to the right-wing juggernaut led by George W. Bush.

I urge members to inform themselves about the president’s class war against public employees and all working people, and be ready to fight back. Start with PEP, which you can also read on our Web site, www.dc37.net, and visit our national union’s Web site, www.afscme.org. We may need to take this battle to the streets, and we must all be ready to meet the challenge.