And I come here as a daughter raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.

My father was a member of the Teamsters Union in California where he helped to organize better health care for workers. My mother worked for more than 20 years on an assembly line.

It is imperative for the health and safety of millions of workers that we ensure that breathing systems needed for protection are widely available convenient and economical.

We must ensure that every worker has healthcare and is able to save for their retirement. We must ensure that our workers have safe and health working conditions.

Most illegals are without health insurance and when these workers need emergency healthcare the American taxpayer gets stuck with the bill.

Jobs are disappearing from every sector of the economy from engineering to health care workers forcing hundreds of thousands of families into unemployment and low-paying jobs.

San Francisco businesses face many challenges including high rents regulatory burdens and the rising cost of workers compensation insurance and employee health plans.

With the loss of Free Choice Vouchers hundreds of thousands of workers will now be forced to choose between their employers' unaffordable insurance or going without health care.

In societies where mature workers are respected and where their wisdom is respected everybody benefits. Workers are more engaged and productive. Their health is better. They live longer.

By and large mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

You built a factory out there good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads that the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.

The secret to success is good leadership and good leadership is all about making the lives of your team members or workers better.

Many talk about a guest worker program. I think most reasonable people believe that a guest worker program in the farming industry perhaps in the gardening and landscape industries is reasonable.

Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them for the future of Labor is the future of America.

Jobs mean freedom for workers to support their families.

I was an organizer in the Food Agricultural and Tobacco Workers Union down in North Carolina.

It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience.

As you know Social Security functions under the premise that today's workers will help finance benefits for retirees and that these workers will then be supported by the next generation of workers paying into the same system.

I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start but where you're going. That's family values.

Your ability to communicate is an important tool in your pursuit of your goals whether it is with your family your co-workers or your clients and customers.

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him family was everything. We could disagree inside the house but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor he looked sideways but said okay.

My restaurants are never opened on Thanksgiving I want my staff to spend time with their family if they can. My feeling is if I can't figure out how to make money the rest of the year so that my workers can enjoy the holidays then I don't deserve to be an owner.

Never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people - your family friends and coworkers and even strangers you meet along the way.

Workers have kept faith in American institutions. Most of the conflicts which have occurred have been when labor's right to live has been challenged and denied.