CWAers Participate in "Working Families Summit" in Iowa

The Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO held a standing-room only "Working Families Summit" at Iowa State University to discuss how to wrest the government back from the wealthy.

More than 500 active leaders from 56 organizations spent the Saturday at the Ames campus of Iowa State University, in general sessions and workshops uniting around issues and strategies at the Working Families Summit.

More than 500 participants in the summit came from 56 organizations, including groups such as Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI); Iowa Citizen Action Network (ICAN); Progress Iowa; League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); Iowa State Education Association (ISEA); Iowa Citizen Action Network (ICAN); Americans for Democratic Action (ADA); Iowa Alliance for Retired Americans (ARA); Iowa Policy Project; Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa; Iowa Community Action Association; Iowa Main Street Alliance; Fair Share-Iowa and the American Friends Service Committee.

The summit's featured speakers included former U.S. Labor Secretary and U.C. Berkeley Public Policy Professor Robert Reich and CWA President Larry Cohen as keynoters. They held work sessions on topics such as wages, immigration, health care, and education.

"We were labor and green, students and seniors, farmers and community organizers, urban and rural, immigrants and native born, all realizing that more than ever, we have a common narrative based on democracy and economic justice that goes beyond our organizational silos, as important as those silos may be," Cohen wrote in his Huffington Post column.

Reich discussed "Making America Work for the Many, Not Just the Few," in his remarks.

"People ask me what country we should emulate; I say we should emulate America when we created the largest middle class the world had ever seen, when we had upward mobility, when we were on the road to equal opportunity," The Ames Tribune reported Reich saying in his speech. 

Mike Vajda, an employee at RELCO Locomotives, was one of three Iowans who opened the summit with stories about unionization efforts and fighting wage theft, according to the Des Moines Register.