But also, we need these moments to place these vvicto these vid campaigns as part of a broad vision and agenda that works for all. The renewed social contract for the 21st century if you will. So thank you, david, for this amazing piece of work that is this book and all that you have led and are continuing to lead in the world and creating this moment and similar moments across the groups to come together and reflect and animate us forward. I also want to thank mark and nikki and diane from new press. A few years ago we began talking about how great it would be to have a series of books about the future of work. Uplifting stories into the values of the activists and changemakers. The first we also launched a few years ago. Weve bee been proud to partnerh you and its exciting to see the second book come into the world and i know that it will indeed and already has been a powerful tool as the Movement Continues to evolve and grow. So because i feel like i in anya room of friends and i think most of you are indeed friends, i can introduce myself. Im from the Ford Foundation and im a Program Officer in the quality work and Economic Security area. And i just want to say i think that they will be up here talking later it is just we are incredibly proud to partner with you and several of the groups that cosponsored the event of the National Employment project and the Roosevelt Institute and i have to say that reading the book i it was like a moment in time. It was something that was very connected and very committed supporting the stories and the voices in the campaigns that have been hard fought and we are thrilled to continue to partner with you as we move forward to make this agenda and beyond. So i hope you did grab a drink and bring it in. You are welcome to go back out and bring it in. The idea is that this is a celebration come a moment to pause and reflect and a discussion to be had here and take it out into the hallways. Without further ado i would love to introduce my co sponsor here to get us into the program. [applause] good evening, everybody and thanks to everybody for bringing us together to celebrate publication. We all know thats the kind of political alliances and personal friendships that we build the kind of gatherings that you host our vital and a lot of what makes the work work. Tonight i have to very eas a vek of introducing david roth the president of the southern 75 which as all of you know organizers. I would like to talk about free elements of who david is. First as a visionary leader leader in the second as a writer and a truth teller and a third is a friend. So the visionary leader part you all know about. He helped the strategy that started at the ten square mile city of 26,000 people so that strategy moved to seattle and now scores of campaigns across the country and the fact that raising the wage to 15 as part of the everyday National Conversation at dinner tables across america and in the 2016 president ial and the fact my mom and dad asked me about i ask mei go home for the holidays that can all be traced back to the guy that we are here to celebrate tonight but this isnt the only thing david has helped us start. Our move to thinking about making the benefits portable, paid leave and sick time and unemployment, the idea that those could follow you when viewing the 21st century economy move, a lo a lot of that which u now hear a dinner tables across america and president obamas speeches, that was also partly david idea. Or a startup Funding Organization called the workers lab that many of you are involved in. That is his brainchild, too. Each of these shows his commitment to finding new solutions to the very old problem of building real power and scale for workers. David is able to do this because he is a thinker and a truth teller. He is rare among the leaders in that hes been able to say our movement is shrinking and by many measures it is dying. We have threats from the outside, technological change is real and we have threats from within so therefore we have to think differently about different allies and Business Models and if we are to actually see the kind where we are working americans and if we want to see working americans, period. David doesnt just talk about this obviously you were holding the fact he writes things down that allows hi them to make connections between the history of the Labor Movement and anyone can ask about the origins. He connects the history of the Labor Movement on where we stand today to where we are headed tomorrow and finally as a friend. I was thinking about this this morning and i think that hes kind of a persuasive rabblerouser work troublemaker and i look forward to getting a call from him because the conversation always starts with Something Like ive got this idea i think that we should come and i never know how that sentence is going to end. Theres probably some work for me at the end of that sentence but you all know that he brings us ideas are goo that are good l of us and all of us together to make those a reality. So without further ado, david. [applause] thank you. You can see now i have to recover from this blushing attack. I dont normally get normile i hear less polite things about me said across the table at the city hall or state capital. Its a little bit of an audit experience for someone that is basically listens and talks for a living to have to read rather than stand here and extend prize that im told now what must happen is i have to read passages from the book. So the heart of the evening is really going to be the Panel Discussion in a few minutes. I selected two passages one from the beginning and one from near the end of my book on the fight for 15 the right wage for working america. Starting from near the beginning of the book i will just ask people since we are in a president ial Election Year to get into the mental time machines and go backwards to a moment in my childhood that i will read from here out. Imagine an alternative history of the president ial election. America is celebrating its bicentennial with fireworks and two men from a republican from michigan and a democrat from dem georgia are campaigning to be president. One was on with one of them hada speech by fellow americans one could imagine him saying this difficult decade will come to an end. Watergate will slowly fade. There will be no more lines for gasoline, no more stagflation. In fact the berlin wall will crumble in our lifetimes, the cold war will end. Cold war will end. The Nuclear Threat will recede into there will be no more military threats to the soil. The last to the full economic participation will fall. China, korea, brazil and south africa will join the Global Economic community and lift hundreds of people out of lifethreatening poverty. Americans will invent or reinvent and create wealth that has been created in the entire history of humankind. Technology will dramatically improve the lives of all americans and most around the globe and america will continue to be the wealthiest nation of its productive workers. That would have been an astounding set of predictions all of which as it turns out would have come true. But imagine if it continued, my fellow americans of all the wealth or country produces 95 for go to the top 1 of income earners. Earners. A few hundred will amass more wealth than the bottom 50 combined. The bottom 80 to 90 wont see a sign of increased pay into the bottom 50 will have to take a pay cut. We will export manufacturing can import wages, divest from the infrastructure, deregulated globalized, privatize, break the unions, bankrupt the system, shred the funding for their mobile and urban public education, make debtfree college a thing of the past. Turn our backs on the middle class and with the economic apartheid for black and brown americans and the Economic Impact doubling the Work Force Participation between 1977 to 2012 will be 0 in takehome pay at the bottom 90 o of families and the one that can reasonably afford a comfortable middleclass life on a single persons paycheck today will need to dream comes to live the same life a generation from now. His party probably would have been out of power for three years. No one would have voted for such and get just like the optimistic first part, the second part of the president ial speech would also turn out to be true and it became true not because of a historical accident but because the Economic System was intentionally rigged in favor of large corporations and wealthy americans over everyone else. Trickledown economics as if it were written into the founding documents of the country. 200 years of struggle and progress had been reversed over the course of the last 40 years. If a foreign power had announced that was it wasnt planned for e america we would have gone to war. So that is how large measure of things. Was the 27th of january so you will notice in this passage just how fast the events have occurred since then because already some of what im about to read is a little out of date. Its become ever clearer that americans are ready for a change. January 2015 poll showed 63 of americans support a 15dollar minimum wage. April 15, 2015 strikes for 15 helped organize were joined not just by fast food workers but also home care aides, child care can adjunct faculty and retail workers. They took place in an astounding 236 u. S. Cities. Workers in 40 other countries joined solidarity actions. Chicago raised its minimum wage to 13, los angeles train to seattle and San Francisco raising to 15. California raised its minimum wage to 16. The mayors of boston and new york, st. Louis and kansas city proposed minimumwage increases to 15 activists in washington, d. C. Are organizing, is what i read in january 2315 othe 15doe on june 2016 municipal ballot. In congress from 2010 through 2014, proposals for considered extreme. 9 was a more centrist than the while conservatives wanted no change. In the spring of 2015, senators callesenatorscall for a popularl minimum wage, blowing past years of the capitol hill politics. In the summer of 2015, another group o of senators and representatives introduced a bill to give 15. In 2014, thousands of the workers at Johns Hopkins hospital when a Union Contract that included a 15dollar minimum wage for the longtime employees while tens of thousands of long teaching workers in los angeles bargained a 15dollar minimum wage in their Union Contract. In the spring of 2015 the hospital workers in minnesota did the same. Workers in massachusetts pardoned a contract in june 2015 that would raise the starting wages to 15 by 2018. Washington state saw the highest two above 15 in the contract and one Retirement Benefits for the first time. The major proposed a 15dollar minimum wage that would require the state of change and a city law change. Governor dismissed the figure is unrealistic and in early 2015 when the Assembly Proposed raising the minimum wage of 15, he said god bless them, shoot for the stars. He put forward his own plan to raise it to 11. 50 and 10. 50 elsewhere in the state. But the 15dollar movement moved him as well and quickly by the middle of 2015 he had appointed for the fast Food Industry that recommended the raising wages to 15 fast food workers were sent to make 15 by 2018 and 2021 and the rest of the state. Sensing the change in the political whim he went even further to september 2015 announcing a proposal to increase the minimum wage to 15. 15 an hour will be the highest in the nation and will herald a new economic contract with america and its about time nine months later. By november he put his money where his mouth was and established a 15 over minimum wage the highest such in the nation. That is a long way for a politician to travel in less than a year. The New York Times editors blog ran a headline that summed up what seemed to be on the be e nations mind a starting wage of 15 an hour, the new normal and this all happened months before the election got underway in iowa and new hampshire. Every great moment for justice in history has begun with a seemingly implausible demand the abolition of slavery when the entire economy was built on slavery and the constitution was written to ensure its political survival and one in five workers those under 16, when in suffrage at the time when the political machines in a major religious states and powerful industries fear of losing power or income if they gained the right to vote in an eight hour day with fulltime manufacturing and construction with an average of 100 hours a week into th the eno the passage of the federal civil rights and Voting Rights laws medicare, medicaid and eventually obamacare to dramatically expand coverage and now equality for all gdt americans. Impossible . The fight has been called impossible and even meaner insane and an economic death wish. It established a fair work week, expand the rights and all produced powerful policy victories that created a more just society in the generation. As weve seen only a fewyearsold its already won major victories. The challenges of poverty come , income and poverty and slow Economic Growth with only becoming more acute. They need high wages and although wall street fight it its been a poor steward of the american economy. This isnt going to fix itself. In other words, us. Now is the time for the people and the representatives, candidates and members of congress, state houses and counsel to see the opportunities presented to them and the chance to be part of the Significant National movement to do something both popular and is eligible for the American Workers. 100 years from now People Living in America Today will be remembered by name. What people will remember is whether we had the courage to stand up for the American Dream when it was at its greatest moment of risk and whether he left a vibrant middle class for those that came after us. Lets hope we give them reason to remember us would appreciate it. Thank you. [applause] thank you david. Weve gotten that call whether its been the literal call with this call that you just left us with. Many would say when he won the campaign and got more than we thought we could you are not done so this is the idea, to have this conversation is okay lets look forward and here weve come out of the several years of thinking big thoughts and talking with many of you helhowdo we take on these bigget issues we take on inequality so in the new agenda it is called for before further. Then when we wanted to have this conversation we thought who could help to have a lively conversation that starts getting at how do we think about the way in which the institutions need to be transformed and how do we think about the Labor Movement, what is the social movement. How do we think about the thoughts and ideas and guessing the house of philanthropy so we all said she would be a wonderful person. I want to ask her to come up. Shes always been an amazing partner on this and as you all know, as if you havent please go check out her website asking some of the most interesting questions and discussions of the time of what is i if what is ite for us to move forward for this kind of economy and agenda and inequality that has put out. We hav we have an amazing panel. Thank you everyone. [applause] lively conversation but you are all drinking wine i see. Lets bring up the panelists. We will be speaking for a little while and also take questions. I will ask you to wait for the microphone to come your way but in the meantime im going to ask the panelists to come up to the stage. I will sit in the far right but its hard left from your point of view and bring up david. [applause] let me introduce who is who. This to my left, Vice President of the Ford Foundation and survivor of this process we will hear more about some of the associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and a coworker center organizing at the edge of change as she puts it, david who you just heard from, the president of 775 and the executive director and cofounder of the guestworker alliance among other things. Thank you all. Lets start with the question you put at the very end. The question you put at the end to say what is the improbable and the plausible demand of today im going to pose to you. We were winning the fight for 15. The other demand that the workers had when they walked off for the first time in november of 2012 was the union and i think im probably in the growing minority of labor leaders activists and thinkers that would say that union is unlikely to look like my grandfathers union or my moms Teachers Union that the question of whats new forms of power are going to emerge that combine the power to make the Companies Say yes when they want to say no and with the scale to touch tens of millions of workers with a revenue model that allows resilient even giving the bad economies and political disfavor is the needle that has to be threaded. Whatever that means in the 21st century context which i dont need a set of specific legal responsibilities but the sense of collective power at scale in a Sustainable Way is i think the problem for our time and we are going to solve the problem and give it relatively directly as more and more states find they are starving for job applicants. That is the low hanging fruit. The harder problem to grapple with is what the power looks like in the 21st century economy. If we are looking at what is the working class look like in that phrase white working class, i think it is quickly running ou