Thank you, Jeffrey [McGuiness, President of HRPA] for those kind words, and my thanks to Randy McDonald for his invitation to join you this morning and share some thoughts on behalf of the 10 million working men and women I am privileged to represent.

When I realized that I would be a major speaker at a conference for an association that represents 250 major companies, I have to admit that I wondered whether you might have been expecting a different John Sweeney.

But the fact is that I have a great deal of respect for this association and the work you all do and I have tremendous respect for Randy.  Most important, I believe there’s a lot we can agree on.

I think we can agree that things are not good in our economy.

We’re in an economic predicament that is crushing corporate profits and shareholder value just as surely as it is crushing the hopes of America’s workers.  I believe it is in the interest of all of us to be thinking about a different kind of economy.

You all know the story:  Connect a housing bubble that has burst with a sub-prime mortgage industry collapse, a credit crisis, and a pull-back in consumer and business spending, and you’ve created an economic maze that is extremely hard to navigate. 

Economists are dueling over whether we’re in a recession.  But for working families, it’s not a very important distinction when you can’t afford to fill up your gas tank without cutting out a meal for the family at a fast food restaurant – never mind saving for college.  It’s terrible out there and it is likely to get worse, much worse. 

But it’s not just a cyclical problem.  For a generation, while profits and productivity and CEO salaries soared, workers’ wages have been stagnant.

Working families have maintained household incomes and middle-class lifestyles by taking on multiple jobs, sending more family members into the workforce and by running up their credit cards.  Last year, even household income declined, and many families had to draw down equity in their homes to make ends meet.

Companies, meantime, have been struggling to maintain long-term value against a hedge-fund mentality competing with the double plagues of Wal-Mart standards and the worst kind of short-termism.  It is killing off ingenuity and morale just as surely as it’s destroying living standards and shareholder value.  For the people who live with these companies every day, it’s gone from tough to tougher.

Today, we’re faced with more than a financial crisis, we’re looking down the barrels of a confidence crisis. 

Nowhere is the damage more evident than in health care, and the threat to our country and our way of life is so big and so dangerous that I think it compels us to work together.

You know the numbers.  Nearly 47 million Americans have no health insurance at all, 8 million of them children.  The sharpest climb in the uninsured is among middle-income workers,  those making between $18,000 and $55,000 a year.  And for those who have coverage the rising cost of premiums and increasing deductibles and co-pays are eating away at paychecks and family budgets. 

Our infant mortality and life expectancy rates compare miserably with those of other industrialized nations.  Millions of Americans have to choose daily between food, shelter, prescription drugs, and visits to the doctor.

I hope we can agree on that level alone that our health care system is the shame of our nation.

But there’s another side to the health care crisis all of you deal with every day.

Employer sponsored insurance is the backbone of health care in America.  It covers about 71 percent of adults and it pays close to half of the cost of care nationally.  Companies have staggered under the weight of premiums that have doubled over the last seven years, even as the number of workers being offered coverage has shrunk and their share of costs has risen.  Retiree coverage is all but gone. 

And it gets worse.  American businesses that provide adequate health care benefits are handicapped in the global marketplace competing with foreign competitors that do not have to carry health costs on their balance sheets.  This affects workers too.  The wages of manufacturing workers in the U.S., for example, lag behind four of our top six trading partners while our health care costs exceed those in all six countries by an average of almost a dollar an hour. 

Here at home, you face a similar disadvantage against domestic competitors who shirk their responsibilities and all of us end up essentially subsidizing your competitors.

As a labor leader who knows workers can’t bargain decent contracts with employers who can’t compete and aren’t profitable, I think that’s outrageous.

And it’s a problem for our economy.  You can’t have a robust economy with consumer buying power without health care and pensions as well as competitive companies.

Thankfully the past eight years have seen an unprecedented degree of cooperation and collegial work among all parties in health care on the very substantial problems in quality and safety that plague health care in America. 

Prompted by the reports of the prestigious Institute of Medicine, a clear consensus has arisen among purchasers, providers and clinicians that there are serious shortcomings in the quality of health care in the US, that costs are excessive due to an epidemic of inappropriate care, overuse of services and inefficiencies in health care delivery -- and that these are all fixable problems to a great extent.

We are spending 16 percent of our national economy on health care and we lose 180,000 people each year due to preventable medical errors and medication mishaps. 

To put it bluntly, the situation is unsustainable.

I want to salute the current Administration for its role in tackling the quality, safety and efficiency problems in health care.  We disagree with them mightily on certain health care issues but we are happy to work with them on “re-engineering” health care delivery.

So I think it’s clear we stand on common ground when it comes to health care. 

I am also acutely aware that with more than $6 trillion dollars in workers’ deferred wages invested in American business, our unions have a huge responsibility to help maximize corporate long term value creation.

And so when it comes to finding a solution to our health care crisis, we are bound together – business and labor – by our common interests, and to paraphrase our great revolutionary hero Benjamin Franklin, “If we don’t hang together, we shall surely all hang separately.”

IBM and four other companies have decided they do not want to hang separately.

With the help of Randy McDonald, the AFL-CIO and IBM – and then G.E., Aetna, Bristol Meyers Squibb and McDonald’s – have agreed on a beginning set of principles to work together to seek universal health care for all.

We’ve agreed that we need a health care system that is affordable, comprehensive and sustainable for employers, unions, government and the general public.  We share a realization that we need a new system in which everyone is covered and employers are not at a competitive disadvantage for providing health insurance.   We believe that any plan that is adopted must emphasize prevention and strengthen the delivery of primary care.  We believe that technology systems must be upgraded to simplify administration and support informed decision-making, the elimination of medical errors, medical practice transformation, and performance and price transparency.

Most important we’ve agreed – as Randy so rightly put it in a recent letter to the AFL-CIO, “The status quo is unacceptable.  This challenge needs to be addressed immediately and business, labor and other interested groups should come together to agree upon a plan for shared responsibility and reforming our health care finance system to achieve these goals.”

What we’ve begun is a process we hope will lead to a more definitive set of principles for health care. 

This approach of finding common ground is not limited to health care. 

Last year, the AFL-CIO participated in a broad-based effort to agree on principles embodying a long-term approach to executive pay and corporate governance.  We did this together with the Business Roundtable, the Council of Institutional Investors, CALPERS, and leading companies like Xerox and Pfizer through the Aspen Institute’s Corporate Values Strategy Group.

The idea was that everyone – management, workers and long term investors – needs executive pay and corporate governance to have a long term orientation.

We came together around principles such as an end to running corporations on a quarterly basis, a 90 day clock.  An end to executive pay packages that let CEO’s cash out their equity on the day they leave office.  A common commitment by management to look to the long term and by investors like our pension funds to support management who have that philosophy.

We have been pleased to see recently that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has signed onto these principles and I hope each of your companies will sign on individually.

That was corporate governance and this is health care reform.  But the idea of well thought out principles is the same — we need something we can lock arms around and march up to Capitol Hill with together and demand that our federal government get busy doing what it’s supposed to do, and that’s the people’s work.

Today, I want to invite every company represented here to join us and help turn our prestigious group into a bigger prestigious group.  We haven’t developed a timeline but we’re working now on a joint Op-Ed piece and thinking about some public announcement in the near future.

I also want to commend IBM for its long-time leadership on health care.  They’ve worked hard to develop health coverage for the uninsured through National Health Access and for retirees through Retiree Health Access.  And along with other companies, they were an early instigator of transparency, better quality of care, and reimbursement reform, and they’ve been extremely active in the Leap Frog initiative.

Brothers and sisters, I don’t expect we can agree on everything. 

We in labor firmly believe that if America is once again going to be a country with a strong middle class we have to restore the freedom of working people to join together in unions and bargain for better wages and benefits.  That’s why passing the Employee Free Choice Act is our highest priority.  It is a cornerstone of a vibrant economy that works for all. 

We will be devoting a lot of effort – in the elections that are already underway and in the months that follow – to making the changes our country needs so it will work for everybody.  We need to restore the confidence that our government represents all of us, and the expectation that it must.

I think we can work together to rebuild our economy – from creating green jobs to saving retirement benefits – and especially, to fixing our health care system.  These tasks demand our best efforts because we have no place to turn but to each other.  We’re all being eaten alive by the health care monster.

We have a saying in the labor movement that when we work together and stand together and fight together we win together.

Let’s get busy winning again.

Thank you and God bless you and your families and our great country.