Progress Illinois

Last night, SEIU Illinois Council President Tom Balanoff spoke at the Democratic National Convention, alongside numerous other familiar faces from the Prairie State.  Here's a video put together by SEIU in anticipation of the honor:

And here's the full text of Balanoff's speech:

I bring you warm greetings from 175,000 hard-working members of the SEIU of Illinois. I was born in 1950. My father was a steelworker in south Chicago. Like millions of other industrial workers in this country, he believed in the American dream: if you worked hard, you could build a good life for yourself and your family and create better opportunities for your children.

My parents, like millions of other working families, were able to own a home and car and put their children through college. Back then, in that City of Big Shoulders, the Chicago of the 1950s and ’60s and ’70s, the American dream was a reality. By the early 1980s, as our economy began to globalize, the steel industry was in decline, and industrial plants were closing all over our country—and especially in Chicago.

That’s what Barack Obama found when he moved to Chicago in 1984. On the south side of Chicago, in the aftermath of steel plant closings, this enormously talented man, who undoubtedly had many other opportunities, chose to begin his political career at the grassroots level.

As a community organizer, he devoted his considerable gifts to helping displaced workers and their families try to rebuild their lives. He worked with church-based groups to bring job training programs to poor neighborhoods. He organized tenants in successful efforts to remove asbestos from public housing. He committed himself to improving the future of hard-working people devastated by the decline of the manufacturing sector.

It was this experience as a community organizer that has greatly influenced Barack Obama’s political perspective and which is at the core of his identity. He understands the challenges that working families face. He knows that they are the strength of this nation. He knows that in the current economic climate, many of these families struggle despite how hard they work every day.

Barack Obama believes that if you go to work in the United States, you should not have to live in poverty. He believes that hard work should be rewarded with a living wage, health care, and a secure retirement, and that these rewards will build stronger families and communities and a stronger America. John McCain looks to Wall Street and says the economy is OK. Barack Obama looks to Main Street and knows that it is not OK. The working families of this country cannot afford four more years of Bush-McCain economic policies.

Barack Obama offers the change we need to revive the American dream for millions of America’s workers and their families.

We'll post video when we can get ahold of it.  Also, we'll be interviewing Tom in Denver tomorrow, so check back for that video in the afternoon.

(Full disclosure: SEIU Illinois sponsors this website)