Thank you for inviting me, and it is an honor for me to be here with you today. Let me thank the UAW [United Auto Workers] for standing up not only for your own members, but for the working class of this country. The fight you are waging here is not just about decent wages and working conditions and pensions in the automobile industry. It is a fight to take on corporate greed and to tell the people on top, this country belongs to all of us, not just a few.

There is a reason why a recent Gallup poll had 75 percent of Americans supporting the UAW. They are sick and tired of an economy in which the rich get richer while working families struggle and the most desperate sleep out on the streets. What this struggle is about here in the Midwest is a demand that we finally have an economy that works for all of us, not just a few.

I want to say a few words about something you don’t see much about on TV or in the halls of Congress. What is going on in the American economy today is that at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were fifty years ago. In other words, despite a massive increase in worker productivity in the automobile industry and in every sector of our economy, despite the fact that CEOs now make four hundred times what their average worker makes, despite record-breaking corporate profits, despite corporate America spending hundreds of billions on dividends and stock paybacks, the average American worker today is worse off than he or she was fifty years ago.