They want to put all of us in that corporate policy box together. They want to cut our wages in half. They want to destroy the benefits that our fathers and grandfathers and mothers and grandfathers fought and too often died for.

I got to tell you, Brothers and Sisters, there are many so-called progressive politicians and economists, and unfortunately, even some leaders in the labor movement who say we should accept the confines of that policy box. We should accept it as a new reality. We should accept it as a new way of life and that we should organize and bargain and do our lobbying and do our politics within the confines of that box.

Well, that means accepting cuts in wages. That means giving up defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare benefits. It means allowing our employers to take control of our workplace and granting rights to unionize only the workers who are willing to belong to company unions.

Well, I want you to know something. I want you to know that at the AFL-CIO, we don't agree with that kind of thinking. That we will never knuckle under to corporate greed or conservative creed and we will never be content with working inside the box or even just thinking about outside the box because our job is to knock down the walls of that box, destroy the policy box for a better America for our kids and for their kids, and we won't accept anything less.

Well, how do we destroy the corporate policy box? Well, someone once said that when we're in a crisis our first instinct is to ask how do we get out, when we should be asking how did we get in.

Our enemies have put us in a corporate policy box because they have the political power to make the laws and the regulations that keep us there. They have the political power to have judges destroy our contracts, our pensions, our healthcare. And they gained that power through money. They bought the politicians and the politicians delivered control.

Now, we, we can only destroy that box by growing as a political force that delivers, by educating, by energizing, by mobilizing our own members as never before, by recruiting new member activists, by reaching out to working people throughout our entire community, through our affiliate of working America, and driving a public debate that insists that working people's interests, that our interests, the interest of the people who make the country move, be front and center.

Now, at the AFL-CIO we've put together the strongest political action program that we've ever had, targeting swing states with more resources and more staff than ever before, and our international unions are stepping up to the plate, spending millions of dollars and putting tens of thousands of stewards and activists to work out in the field educating, mobilizing and energizing our base.

But we all know that strong national programs are just a step in the right direction. What has to happen now is for leaders of our local unions, like all of you, each and every one of you in this hall, to get a little mad, and then after you get a little mad, decide that we'll get a little even.

See, we will win this fall not because of what all of us wearing union suits do and say in our union suits, but because of the union feet, the union feet that each one of you and each one of us have to put in the streets.