I served in public service for over 35 years. I was in the Congress for 28 years. And in all of those years, I felt my mission was to represent the working people of this country because in my view the working people of this country that make up the middle class of the country are the reason America is great, and trust me there is a middle class in this country because, and only because, of labor unions like the Boilermakers union.

I learned the value of labor unions at an early age. My dad was a Teamster. He was a milk truck driver in St. Louis, Missouri. He got up at 3:00 o'clock in the morning and went to work and came home at 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon. He worked hard.

He used to tell me at the dinner table and my brother and my mother that we had food on the table and clothes on our back because he was fortunate to be represented by a labor union that could get him fair wages and compensation for his very hard work.

And he used to say to me, Dick, without the union, I would have no bargaining power as an individual to get the wages to get the healthcare to get the pension that supports our family. That's a lesson I never forgot. And that's a lesson that America needs to relearn in the days ahead.

What's happening in America today? I'll tell you what's happening. We have an obsession a mania with low prices, with the supply side of the economy. Everybody is trying to get more goods at a cheaper price. Nobody's paying attention to the demand side, to what workers are being paid.

You remember what Henry Ford said, "I got to pay my workers enough so they can buy the cars they are making." That's a lesson that America needs to relearn. This mania with price has got to stop.

Wal-Mart's a great store. It does provide lots of cheap materials for their consumers, but if the whole focus is on price and not on demand and what workers have in their pockets and on the building of a middle class, which has always been the foundation of this country, America will cease to be what it has been and what it needs to be.

Wages are under attack like never in our history. Union -- if people are in unions they are being asked to do concessions, wage give-backs, healthcare give-backs, pension give-backs because there is this unrelenting attack on the compensation of workers even to the point where we've not been able to get the government, which always supported wages through at least a minimum wage, to raise the minimum wage. It hasn't been raised for 8 or 9 or 10 years.