Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, warned the Local 237 shop stewards that the Republican President and House of Representatives “are gambling with the future of our families and the fate of our union movement,” and called on union members to get more involved in political activity.

Trumka said that while the last Presidential election was decided before courts in Florida and Washington, workers didn’t have much chance at winning because the game was rigged and the deck was stacked against them and their families.

“When the vote went against Bush, they covered the table with more money and backed up their bluff with all the high-priced legal con artists they could hire,” he said.

“The con job didn’t stop there,” he added. “These same big corporations and multi-millionaires outspent us 15-to-one in the Congressional races and gave us a House of Representatives controlled by a couple of right-wing Texas gunslingers named Dick Armey and Tom DeLay and, until this week, a Senate dictated by the tie-breaking vote of a Texas oil millionaire, Dick Cheney.”

The nation is “witnessing the most anti-union, anti-worker and, despite all of the pretty rhetoric, the most anti-family administration in the 70 years since Herbert Hoover.”

He said that instead of funding programs on which working families depend, the administration is squandering the budget surplus on a huge tax cut for the wealthy.

“The windfall the very wealthiest one percent in this country are getting,” he said, “is enough to pay two million teachers’ salaries, or the wages of two million police officers, for 10 years!”

That windfall, he added, could also have multiplied the government’s contributions to school renovation and construction by 59 times, or more than double the amount being spent to support mass transit, highways and aviation.

Trumka urged the membership to become more aware of what is going on in government and more active in the political system. Only then, he said, can some fairness in spending be restored.

“You can help translate the anger and frustration our members feel — and much of the public shares — into grassroots legislative action,” he said. “We can win because we have something that money can’t buy; we have our hands and our heads and our hearts — and we have each other and our solidarity.”