Americans. You have a choice. You can fight with one another. You can hate each other. You can envy one another. You can see your neighbor as having it better than you and think it is not fair – or – instead, you can stand together at long last and work towards a better, happier and peaceful future.
Let me be clear to whom I am talking. I am talking to you, the hard working men and woman who do the best they can every day for their families and for their employers. I am also talking to those hard working Americans who have lost their jobs in this great and terrible recession.
So many hard working Americans. I am talking to people who work in stores, in call-centers, in hotels and nursing homes. People who work as cooks, waiters or waitresses, cafeteria workers, plumbers, electricians, car salesmen, and bookkeepers. People who are cashiers, secretaries, auto mechanics, and factory workers. Men and woman who are, farmers, janitors, and pharmacists. There are the maids, barbers, hair stylists, grocery workers, bus drivers, cab drivers, laborers, house painters - the list of hard working Americans is endless.
If you are a small business owner, in health care work or law, I am talking to you also!
You are all hard working Americans who do the best you can. You have all had to sacrifice over this last number of years to make ends meet.
Let me talk to you about some of your hard working neighbors. They include teachers, police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, courthouse clerks, school maintenance workers, government office secretaries, postal workers, and many others who work as public servants.
They choose public service work for many reasons, just as you choose your work for many reasons. Sometimes it was simply the best option at the time. Sometimes it was the desire to earn a fair and decent living doing something important - like teaching your children, protecting you from crime, catching the bad guys, putting out fires, saving your life.
Over these last many years, so many years I have lost count, your public servant neighbors have watched as your employers cut your wages, health benefits and right to a secure retirement down to the bone, as you took it in silence and without much complaint. They know how wrong and bad for your family and for America this has been. They want to stand with you to help you achieve the fairness each American should expect and insist upon.
Your public servant neighbors, all across this land, want you to be fairly paid. They want you to have health insurance that does not break your bank. They want you to be able to retire in dignity when the time comes. They believe you have earned it by working hard, sometimes at jobs that offer little incentive other than pay, but at work that must be done. They appreciate the dignity of all work in our society.
What else do they want for you? They want your children and grandchildren to have the best education on earth so that when they grow up they will have rewarding job opportunities that pay fair and decent wages and benefits, that will enable them to raise families in homes of their own and to protect their health at all times. They want your future police officers to be of the highest level of character and integrity, honest as the day is long - not the bottom of the barrel who will take a low wage and dangerous job because its the only thing they can get.
So, we are back to choices. You can choose to complain about the pay and benefits earned by your public servant neighbors. You can choose to demand that their rights that they fought for, and even sometimes went to jail to get, that right simply being to act collectively to achieve fairness in the workplace, be abolished.
There is a better choice. You can stand with your public service neighbors and help them defeat the corrupt, wealthy politicians and global businesses who ship American jobs to other nations where people are willing to work for little money for as many hours per day as demanded.
Stand with them, and they will stand with you if you ask them too. They want to help you improve your lives. Don't help the corporate thugs make every hard working American's life a desperate one. We can go at each other and in turn destroy ourselves or we can join together so that all hard working Americans are respected for their contributions to each other’s lives.
