Warnock Urges Working People to Organize, Unify to Heal Nation’s Spiritual Crisis During UAW Keynote

Today, Senator Reverend Warnock delivered the keynote address at the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) Community Action Program (CAP) Conference

In his remarks to a crowd of nearly 1,000 current and former union members, Senator Warnock outlined how economic opportunity is key to healing our divided nation

The biannual CAP Conference brought together union members from across the country to strategize and build power for the working class

Senator Reverend Warnock: "You ought to keep on organizing and keep on fighting and keep on standing up! Do not give in to those who say put your trust in me, put our trust in each other, and together we win!"

Watch Senator Reverend Warnock's keynote address to UAW HERE

Washington, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (D-GA) delivered the keynote address on day three of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) Community Action Program (CAP) Conference in Washington, D.C.

"Ordinary people have to have movements to declare for themselves the things that ought to be obvious, they have to fight for their personhood, they have to fight for their humanity, they have to fight for their dignity, they have to fight for livable wages, they have to fight for health care, that's what union organizing is all about," said Senator Warnock. "And so I submit to you that you ought to keep on organizing and keep on fighting and keep on standing up! Do not give in to those who say put your trust in me, put our trust in each other, and together we win!"

In his remarks, Senator Warnock addressed the moral burden and overwhelming sense of division weighing on the nation caused by decades of economic stress. The Senator urged the crowd of nearly 1,000, to not lose faith in their fellow American, and stressed the need to organize and stay in the fight during this moment of darkness and unrest.

"I still believe that in America, anything is possible, that even as that dream is slipping away, we cannot give in to those who are trying to weaponize despair, to convince us that the powers the elites have already won and so there's no need to fight, if we believe that, we'll stop fighting. But if we stand up, we stand together, we win. I still believe in that America," Senator Warnock continued.

UAW's CAP Conference is the union's biannual gathering in Washington, D.C., aimed at organizing, strategizing, and building power for the working class. This year's theme for the conference is "Building Working Class Power: Our Time to Lead."

A video link of Senator Warnock's speech can be found HERE.

See below Senator Warnock's keynote speech at UAW's National CAP Conference:

"Thank you so very much. I really am deeply honored by your invitation, for so many reasons. I want to thank Neil [Jameson] for that wonderful introduction. Give him a great big round of applause. I want to thank brother Shawn Fain for his incredible leadership.

Sisters and brothers, I come before you this morning, not only as an elected official, but as a pastor, I often say that I'm not a senator who used to be a pastor, I'm a pastor in the Senate. John Lewis was my parishioner. I had the honor of serving as his pastor, and they often said that he was the conscience of the Congress. He worked on the House side. They said he was the conscience of the Congress. I ran for the Senate because looking at our politics in DC, I said, if the Congress needs a conscience then the Senator is a soul."

"Essentially, I come as one rooted in the Civil Rights tradition, a beneficiary of its work and deeply grateful for the shared history between the movements for worker rights and the movement for civil rights. Those two things, in my mind, are inextricably linked. Civil rights and worker rights, human dignity and the dignity of the work. I think of A. Philip Randolph, that towering figure in the labor movement leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who, in 1925 before Martin Luther King Jr. was even born, was organizing workers for their basic dignity, for a livable wage, so that they might endure the prosperity that they are creating for others, and it's no wonder that when they got ready to organize the March on Washington where Dr. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, it A. Philip Randolph alongside Bayard Rustin who organized that March. When civil rights and worker rights are joined together, we are more powerful and more effective.

I join you today, really in solidarity during this moral moment in our nation. Historians, decades from now, will be writing about this. What did we do? How did we show up in this moment? At a time when masked agents jumping out of unmarked cars are militarizing our streets, boots on the streets, the tools and the stuff of the military, suggesting that we have war with one another. And at the same time, politicians stripping us of our health care and nutrition benefits from working people, and the President of the United States spending his time finding ways to exploit the country, doing a great job of enriching himself and his family. He said, the other day, when I asked about this economy, he said, "I'd rate it an A+." And then he thought about it, corrected himself and said, No, actually, "I'd rate it an A+++." The question you want to ask yourself is, if he really believes that, what is this measure, A+++ for whom? I suggest that it was for those billionaires who were sitting on the stage that day he was inaugurated. That's his base, that's who he has been fighting for.

We're in a moral moment. I traveled to Minneapolis a few weeks ago because I had to go, as a Pastor, I believe in the ministry of presence, sometimes it's good just to show up. And I stood there at the memorial of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. It was a deeply moving experience. As the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King served, I can tell you that both of these young people stood in the best of the Civil Rights tradition in as much as they literally put their bodies on the line. They could have stayed in their relative comfort, but they put their bodies on the line for their neighbors. [What] the administration did not recognize is that the people in Minneapolis know the people that you're trying to make into enemies. And amid this darkness, ordinary people stood up, showing up to speak out against tyranny and to speak up for their neighbors, because they understand that their neighbors' well-being is tied to their own.

Somehow, all of us have to capture that deep moral lesson in this moment that my neighbor's children and my own children are tied together. So in my work, I always try to center the children, because regardless of whatever fancy titles I may have, I'm very clear, my most important job and my most rewarding job is father to two precious little children. They are my North Star. I talked to them this morning on FaceTime, nine and seven, they're always bossing me around. But I think about those two little children, and as I do my work, there was another child that I'm always thinking about, because long before the people of Georgia gave me the honor of being a voice for them in the United States Senate, long before I had the honorable serving as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church, I was just a kid growing up in the housing projects in Savannah, Georgia.

You look at me, you're not just looking at the United States Senator, but a kid who grew up in public housing. A Headstart kid. I know the difference that good federal public policy makes, but I was number 11 out of 12 children, my folks, who were Pentecostal preachers, clearly read the Bible, "Be fruitful and multiply." There was not a lot of money in our house, but I really feel like I hit the jackpot, because I had two great parents. There was a lot of love in our house and a lot of laughter in our house, and deep faith. And my family and my community convinced me that a kid growing up in the housing projects in America. You can still go somewhere. We lived on Cape Street, and they convinced me that I could fly.

I often say that I went to college on a full faith scholarship, that's when you don't have enough money for the first semester. But at age 17, I was just determined that I was going to attend the college that Martin Luther King Jr. attended because his voice so inspired a kid who was born a year after his death. I just wanted to attend the college. God always has a dream bigger than the dream we're dreaming for ourselves. I wanted to attend Dr. King's college, I ended up becoming the pastor of Dr. King's church. When I arrived on the campus of Morehouse College, I didn't have enough money I tell you, for the first semester, my folks were both Pentecostal preachers often spoke in King James English, my mom had a way of saying, "Thou shalt wash their dishes, lest I slack you with my rod and my staff." I looked at my dad, looking for some money. He said, "Silver and gold, have I none, but such as I have give I unto thee the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ go with." He gave me a great big hug, and drove off into the horizon left me standing there. Four years later, I graduated because I had a sense of determination. I had a sense of perseverance. I believed in myself. But I also graduated because somebody gave me some Pell Grants, somebody gave me some low-interest student loans, somebody gave me a work-study job. In other words, I had a path towards progress, I had a path to prosperity and productivity. I had a path.

What keeps me up at night is that I know that it would be harder now for that kid to do what he did all of those years ago. So when you see me standing up, you see me fighting for ordinary people. I'm fighting for that kid who grew up on Cape Street and on Cape Streets all across our country, from Atlanta to Appalachia. In big cities and rural towns, because for too many of those kids, red, yellow, brown, black and white, urban, and rural, that dream is slipping away.

Over the last 50 years, real wages for working families have been stagnant. Today the price of everything from healthcare to housing, to energy bills, to childcare is becoming more expensive, and this administration is doing nothing to ease that burden. I'm not even convinced that they are focused on it, focused on building a ballroom, but I'm not sure that they're focused on building some housing so that people can afford to live somewhere in America. They're undermining the American workers' right to engage in collective action and secure fair compensation. They're killing auto jobs after promising to bring them back. They're siding with billionaires instead of the American worker, and as a result, people are working harder and harder, but are seeing less and less from the work that they're putting in. Young people are wondering if they'll ever be able to afford a home. The average age now for a person buying their first home is age 40 in the United States of America. Older people are wondering if they will never be able to retire with dignity. And those of us who live in the middle are trying to take care of our children and take care of our parents as they deal with both the blessings and the burden of aging. Workers are seeing that they are creating wealth for others, but it's not showing up in their paychecks. And there is a growing sense in our country that our best days are behind us, that even if we work our hardest, our children will fall behind.

There's a sense that there is something amiss, and people feel it. We all do. People on the left, and the right, and the middle, we all feel it. We all feel this sense that there is something broken in the covenant that we have with one another as an American people. As I describe it, it is as if the whole country has a low-grade fever. Do you ever wake up in the morning and you just don't feel good? You know, you can't quite put your finger on it, you just don't feel good. We have ways of describing it, there's that deep ache, the fogginess and the fatigue that doesn't allow you to show up in your full strength, to be your best self. And then you sort of stumble around a while in the darkness. And then you take your temperature to realize you have a low-grade fever, that something is simmering that you can't quite put your finger on, we've been there for a long time as a country. The whole country has a low-grade fever, and we all feel it regardless of our politics. We may not agree on how to fix it, but we all feel it, and the stakes could not be higher. So the question before us is whether we can shake ourselves, whether we can find our way to wholeness again, whether we can build a future that is worthy of our children, all of our children, so that a child's outcome is not based on their parents income. The idea of an American covenant that we share with one another is the recognition that Dr. King was right "We are tied in the single garment and destiny caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."

This is why the labor movement is so important and why you will always have my support, and always have an ally in me. I believe in organized labor because working people are so often crushed by the machinery of power, unless they stand together. I believe in organized labor because collective bargaining and union organizing really is democracy in the workplace. It is democracy in the places of human production, without which we see a yawning chasm, a growing divide between the prosperity that workers produce for others and what they enjoy for themselves. It is the path through which you get health care, you get a livable wage, you get time off, and you get to retire with dignity and leave something for your children. I believe in labor.

But right now too many Americans don't have a union who can fight for these things. Their lacking economic opportunities, so when that happens, when things are broken, and let's be clear, there were those who have literally been waging war against unions for decades, and after they break that covenant, their emerges in the gap strong men who say, put your faith in me rather than each other. That is the spiritual crisis that we're facing right now. This is how President Trump was able to take healthcare away from 15 million Americans and double the healthcare premiums for 22 million Americans while calling it waste, fraud, and abuse. The question we all ask ourselves is, what is he saying about those Americans when he calls it waste, fraud, and abuse? Are our neighbors waste, fraud, and abuse? It is why we're calling the throne to the politics of rage and anger and division and fear. Donald Trump and JD Vance want for us to be angry at those who have the least. Mean-spirited operations where it seems that cruelty is the point. They elevate the most extreme voices, and they provoke outrage. They keep us engrossed in the culture wars. Meanwhile, we've got real problems to solve, don't we?

We've got to deal with both the promise and the perils of AI, which threatens to be a major disruption for blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs alike. We need thinkers. We need leaders. We need public servants who are thinking ahead of time about how we're going to organize artificial intelligence, so that workers still have a livable wage, so that people still have health care. When we're caught up in the culture wars, when we're caught up in partisan politics, our politics becomes a place where we operate in the narrowest realm of possible.

Now, this might seem strange for someone in my position to say, but I think the vocabulary of our politics is too puny a language for the crisis that confronts us. What can get 60 votes? What can get passed corporate special interests and lobbyists? What won't hurt us in the next election? Politicians in this town are so focused on the next election, and they're not thinking about the next generation. We need people who are thinking far into the future.

I submit that we suffer not from a poverty of resources, but a poverty moral imagination and moral courage, if we center the people, our policies will finally start to address the stress that working families are feeling right now under the stress of structural inequalities. What if we use the levers of government, these immense powers that we're seeing the Trump/Vance administration using every day to exploit working people and make their families richer? What if those resources were leveraged for working families instead, for the American worker? What if we got serious about housing in a country where we're 5 million units short? What if we got serious about childcare? Began to think outside of the box, recognizing that we need childcare so workers can go to work. I knew as an activist and now I know even more as a member of the Senate, too often we have the best politicians that money can buy. So we got to raise the ethical question. We need to enlarge our vision. We suffer a lack of resources, but from a lack of moral imagination. You see it because every time they decide to, they find some more tax breaks for the richest of the rich, it is our priorities that are messed up and mixed up.

So my friends, let us renew the covenant that we have with one another as American an people, that kid who grew up on Cape Street still believes in the country that gave me a chance. I still believe that in America, anything is possible, that even as that dream is slipping away, we cannot give in to those who are trying to weaponize despair to convince us that the powers the elites have already won, and so there's no need to fight if we believe that, we'll stop fighting. But if we stand up, we stand together, we win. I still believe in that America.

So as I close, and nobody believes a Baptist preacher when he says, "As I close". I often think about the fact that Dr. King literally died fighting for workers. He was busy planning the Poor People's campaign, but he took a detour to Memphis, where two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were literally crushed to death in the machinery of their truck. They had been trying to lead this worker movement, and it had fits and starts, but then these two Black workers found themselves in a rainstorm, and they could not get in the cab or the truck. Why? Because, in 1968, four years after the Civil Rights Bill had been passed into law, the logic of Jim Crow still was at work, and so they had to get in the back of the truck. We don't know exactly what happened, but somehow their bodies were literally crushed to death by the machinery. The thing about 1968 is Dr. King showed up. He showed up because, although he was weary and tired, they summoned him by the power of their witness. But in 1968, never forget this, the minimum wage in 1968 had more purchasing power than the minimum wage in 2026. There has been a war against workers, a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots. And Dr. King showed up to fight for them as they held those iconic signs, "I am a man." Ordinary people have to have movements to declare for themselves the things that ought to be obvious, they have to fight for their personhood, they have to fight for their humanity, they have to fight for their dignity, they have to fight for livable wages, they have to fight for health care, that's what union organizing is all about.

And so I submit to you that you ought to keep on organizing and keep on fighting and keep on standing up! Do not give in to those who say put your trust in me, put our trust in each other and together we win!"

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