Thank you, Denis [Hughes] and thanks very much to all of you.  I’ll accept such praise only if you allow me to invoke a New York “Back at you.”

Brothers and sisters, I met Denis Hughes when he was still an apprentice electrician working in the afternoons as a volunteer at the New York Central Labor Council.

Since then, he’s become one of our most articulate and effective leaders and we’re all delighted to have one of our own – a working families champion, a trade unionist – as chair of the New York Federal Reserve.

Mind boggling – Denis, you make us very proud.  In fact, this entire room makes our labor movement proud – I can’t think of a group of leaders who’ve worked harder and smarter over the past four years.  It would be an understatement to say you’ve been the glue that has held us together since our last convention.

At a time when our movement was divided in Washington, you revived us in community after community and proved that our real strength and solidarity is on the ground where our members live and work.

As leaders of our state federations and central labor councils — Change to Win as well as AFL-CIO leaders — you pulled us through some difficult times and in doing so you brought our state and local labor movements into the spotlight you deserve.  You all proved that a unified labor movement at the grassroots is what workers need and want and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I want to especially thank Jimmy Williams and Terry Stapleton for their tremendous leadership as chair and co-chair of our State Fed/CLC Executive Council Committee, as well as our previous chairs Tom Buffenbarger, Terry O’Sullivan and Ed McElroy, and all of the members of our advisory board.

When we began our journey together 14 years ago there were detractors who questioned our “New Voice” campaign pledge to rebuild our movement from the ground up instead of top down.  I knew they were wrong because my background in trade unionism came from my early experiences not only as a local union leader, but as an officer in one of the greatest labor councils in our country and as a vice president of the New York State AFL-CIO.

You proved me right when you undertook the arduous task of restructuring and redirecting yourselves in state after state and city after city, making the hard decisions it took to move us into the 21^st century.

You’ve played a key role in all the progress we’ve made from passing so many minimum wage and living wage laws, to supporting our organizing campaigns that have brought in an average of 450,000 new members every year, to leading our crusade for diversity, inclusion and full participation of women and minorities.

You proved those detractors wrong when you sparked a firestorm that ran Newt Gingrich out of Washington, arguably elected a president in 2000, then stood off the Bush-whackers for eight long years.  You also worked like hell to bring us back together after seven of our valued affiliates left our federation – you made our Solidarity Charter program fly higher than we ever dreamed.

When so many in the media wrote us off politically, you put the wheels on the strongest political program in our history, took the U.S. Congress out of Bush’s hip pocket in 2006, and won so many important state legislative and gubernatorial races.

And take it from me, brothers and sisters, in 2008 we didn’t elect the first African American in our history – our biggest champion of working families in decades – with a magic carpet flying out of Washington.  You did it by carrying the load out where it counts – in the streets, on the phones, in your workplaces, in your neighborhoods, block by block, door by door, member by member.

You brought working families and our unions from the back of the line to the front of the line and today we are poised to win two of our longest struggles — affordable, quality health care for every family in America and the freedom to organize and bargain for every worker in America.

Thanks to you we are at the threshold.

This is our time – the naysayers are wrong, we will pass health care and the Employee Free Choice Act before this year is out.

When I ran for president of the AFL-CIO, I said working families needed a “New Voice” – not only in Washington but in our communities.  As I prepare to step down as your president I’m confident we’re doing just that.

In a very real sense, the AFL-CIO has become the action center of the progressive movement in our country.  At the national level as well as the state and local level we’re not only mobilizing our own union family we’re pulling our allies along with us.

We’re unselfishly encouraging worker centers like the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Interfaith Worker Justice, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, the Domestic Workers of New York, and organizing efforts like the Los Angeles Car Wash campaign.

And because of your work we can honestly say that wherever there’s a campaign or a legislative battle, wherever workers are struggling to organize or to bargain, wherever greedy corporations are squeezing working families, we are the boots on the ground.  We have those boots permanently planted in all 50 states and in more than 500 communities – we never go away.

What makes our Federation so special is all of you and it’s something no other organization in America can match.  Of course, what we need in order to rebuild America are more boots filled with more troops and so our greatest priority is to help more and more workers join our unions.

We’ve seen what more new members and activists can mean through the prism of Working America which now has three million members working together with our traditional membership.

With the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, we’ll have an opening to help bring millions of new members into our unions – as well as into Working America – and we have to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity with our grassroots organizations leading the way.

That means we have to extend our Solidarity Charter program for State Feds and CLCs and establish a Fair Share Solidarity Fee at the local level while we step up our efforts to reunify our movement at the national level.

 It means pushing harder for full affiliation of local unions with our state and local organizations, increasing our emphasis on training for our elected leaders and staff, accelerating our campaign for more diversity.  It means more excellence and accountability from you, more support from us nationally, a faster track for the new alliance process, and greater growth through community-based partnerships.

 There’s an old Native American custom that when you save another person’s life you are thereafter ultimately responsible for that life.  With your incredible work over the last few years you’ve saved our Federation and preserved our movement.  That places a new and heavier responsibility on you to take us to higher levelsfarther up the road to the kind of power working families and union members need and deserve.

 This week in convention, we’ll pass resolutions committing ourselves to strategies to guide us and elect a new team to lead us there.  It’s a team I’m very excited about — and I’m confident that  Liz Shuler, Arlene Holt Baker, and Rich Trumka will be great leaders of our movement.

People ask me what I want my legacy to be.

My response is that my legacy is all of you, who believe as I do that the highest calling in life is building a bigger, stronger labor movement and using it to help working families have the kind of lives they deserve.  Your responsibility is to continue the work we’ve begun together — not just keeping the pace, but increasing it.  I can ask no more of you and you should demand no less of yourselves.

God bless every one of you and your families – thank you.