Roosevelt-Humphrey Day Dinner

Honoring George Becker A Great Success

 

On September 30, 1999, we got together with fellow liberals and friends from the labor movement to honor George Becker, President of the United Steelworkers of America. A packed house celebrated at the Sheraton Hotel as we heard President Becker, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, and Steelworkers Secretary- Treasurer Leo Gerard, as well as ADA National Director Amy Isaacs, speak about strengthening and renewing the ties between labor and liberals.

 

Trumka spoke passionately and eloquently about the struggle we on the left face. But he spoke even more passionately about the successes we have won, and those we have yet to win. "With ADA and labor together," he said, "there's nothing we can't win."

 

Becker spoke about the problems facing us today, and the solutions we must strive for. He was especially forceful about the threat of so-called 'free trade' policies like NAFTA.

 

"If you want to see just how inhumane the results of the free trade philosophy can be, all you have to do is travel across the Texas border into Mexico. I've traveled down there five times now, to the maquiladoras, the industrial colonies that have grown up in Mexico as a result of NAFTA.

 

And what you see there is appalling. You see these Mexican families -- decent, hardworking people trying to give their children a better way of life -- living in the kind of abject poverty that Charles Dickens wrote about in England more than a hundred years ago."

 

He spoke about industry as the eroding foundation of the American middle class, and said, that "above all, we must elect men and women who understand that the loss of American industry will ultimately destroy the foundations of middle class prosperity . . . only if we arrest the loss of industrial jobs will we keep alive the promise of democracy that is impossible without a healthy industrial sector."