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What's going on in this country? Unions stand against those trends. We've got to somehow insulate the robust American economy from this global economy that seems to want to devour our standard of living.

Well, I'm not trying to get rid of the unions, but I am saying that they appear to be an antiquated concept in today's economy.

This is the crux of the problem: because the Republicans and the right wing have been successful in almost eliminating unions, everyone else has suffered as a result.

All the time our union was progressing very nicely. There were lectures to make us understand what trades unionism is and our real position in the labor movement.

Unions go hand-in-hand with a strong middle class.

What until then seemed impossible to achieve has become a fact of life. We have won the right to association in trade unions independent from the authorities, founded and shaped by the working people themselves.

And the success of the union movement, historically, has always been to benefit all working men and women - not just people who belong to the union.

It is true that they paid much more attention to the trade unions because the trade unions were after all speaking for the rights and conditions of working men and women in their employment.

Unions did in fact build the middle class. And here's what that did. That built the United States of America as we know it.

Starting that union was something I believed in very strongly.