NEWS from USWA: Urging Increased Activism, Steelworkers' Gerard Exhorts Convention Delegates to 'Become Missionaries of a Better Tomorrow'.

LAS VEGAS -- Tells Local Leaders That 'the Power is in Our Members,' Recommends Passage of Action Plan to Educate and Mobilize USWA Membership, Communities

Citing a series of successes from the revitalization of the steel industry to passage of a Canadian law that makes corporate management criminally responsible for workers' safety on the job, United Steelworkers of America (USWA) President Leo W. Gerard told delegates to the union's 32nd Constitutional Convention that globalization will undermine these achievements unless union activists reach out to their members and communities to build a broad movement for social change.

"We can't survive as an island of decent wages and benefits in a sea of misery," Gerard told some 2,500 USWA delegates from the U.S. and Canada in his keynote address, because globalization is "eating manufacturing alive."

Railing against "politicians who posture about the value of hard work, then sit on their hands as our pensions and health care are gutted in bankruptcy court," he said the union must "challenge the so-called 'leaders' who preach to us about morality while they shamelessly export our jobs."

These right-wing extremists, Gerard told the delegates, "bend over backwards to enrich their Gucci-shoed, latte-drinking, coupon-clipping, job-destroying, money-grubbing cronies on Wall Street and Bay Street.

"They've raised the stakes for our economic survival by lowering the boom on every social program and progressive law that's been passed over the last 60 years," he said, "including a U.S. president whose scheme to privatize Social Security will wreak economic havoc on the elderly, on widows and the disabled."

Recounting other times when the Steelworkers faced extreme adversity, Gerard said the union was able to triumph because "we learned that if we planned for the worst, we'd seldom be disappointed. And if we didn't plan, the worst could destroy us."

This lesson, he said, was hammered home during the steel downturn of the 1980s, when layoffs and plant shutdowns wiped out 243,000 steelworker jobs in just seven years.

"When all is said and done," Gerard said, "we learned that our union had to change. The days of business as usual were gone - and so were the days of business unionism."

Citing a series of bargaining and public policy successes in the 1990s, Gerard said the key to rebuilding the union's power was a program to educate and mobilize rank-and-file members.

"And if all goes well over the next four days," he added, "our union will welcome 250,000 PACE members into the ranks of what will then be the largest and most powerful industrial union in all of North America."

Delegates will also consider a detailed action plan to increase the union's hand in bargaining and political campaigns in a global economy that has wiped out 3 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and Canada over the past four years.

But the power to improve the lives of working people is not in a convention document or resolution, Gerard told the delegates. "It's in your hands - and in the hands of the thousands who aren't here but want to make a difference if we give them the tools.

"Let's open the doors of activism to all our members," he urged the convention. "Lead them to use their union as an instrument of change - not only in society, but in their very own lives.

"That's how we can change the direction that both our countries are headed in," he declared. "That's how we can create a better life for future generations."

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