The question is always 'What is the role of a labor movement?' How much is about collective bargaining, how much is about social change for all workers?

American workers won't be able to compete fairly for jobs until companies have to pay higher wages in countries like China and India.

I'll never run for office. But I intend, either on the fiscal commission or on issues like immigration, to hopefully have my voice be heard.

I would say the issue for the labor movement in the United States is not structural... there is no correlation between the success of workers and how the labor movement is structured.

Unions have been the best anti-poverty program that actually worked and did not cost the government a dime. But as unions grow smaller- not stronger- our ability to act as an economic mechanism to distribute the gains of our work and raise all workers' wages and benefits up is disappearing.

The union movement has been the best middle class job creating program that America has ever had, and it doesn't cost the government a dime.

Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.