In a society that values profits over the common man, everyday workers must fight even harder for their rights, former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards told graduates from the National Labor College on Saturday.
Edwards, ‘‘the son of a millworker,” as he is fond of mentioning in his speeches, told about 90 graduates of the labor studies college in Hillandale that all Americans deserve the opportunities he had to rise out of a small town, earn a law degree and run for president.
‘‘No one should work full-time in this country and live in poverty,” he said.
And organized labor movements like the unions most NLC students belong to are key in making sure no one has to, Edwards said.
‘‘It’s an example of making higher education available to people who worked hard all their lives,” he said of NLC. ‘‘America is a place that was built by people who work.”
NLC offers bachelor of arts degrees in fields such as labor studies, union leadership and administration and the political economy of labor, as well as master’s degrees through a partnership with American University.
Edwards, a Democrat from North Carolina and a former 2008 presidential candidate and 2004 vice presidential candidate, was a perfect choice for NLC’s commencement speech, said John Sweeney, the president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions.
‘‘Many of our unions supported him for president, and he really set the tone during the primaries; raising the issues of working families and the economy,” said Sweeney, who is also the chairman of NLC’s board of trustees.
Most of NLC’s students are working families who come from around the country to do the one-to-two year program in the middle of their careers in the labor field, said the president of NLC, William Scheuerman. The average age of the graduates Saturday was about 46, he said.
‘‘They’re committed to the labor movement because they know the labor movement brought them into the middle class,” he said.
Shannye Walker Carroll, a labor studies graduate and Frederick resident who lived in Montgomery County for 30 years, said she came to NLC for the same reason her peers did: to help other people.
‘‘Just about everybody that was there had the same mindset of trying to improve fellow co-workers and employee’s lives,” she said.
Graduate Anthony Yushinsky, an air traffic controller from New York, said going back to school was a sacrifice.
‘‘We all have full-time jobs, families and extracurricular activities, which competed for time with our school work,” he said.
But Yushinsky said it was worth it. Their degrees will be imperative to furthering the labor movement, which has suffered under George W. Bush’s presidency, he said.
‘‘This administration has attacked workers at every turn,” Yushinsky said, by freezing wages and voting down worker protection laws.
Edwards said he is also fighting for the labor movement. Since dropping out of the presidential race, he said he has been working on a national anti-poverty campaign called Half in Ten, which aims to slash America’s poverty rate in half in 10 years.
The project is a partnership with four nonprofit organizations and suggests raising the minimum wage, expanding unemployment eligibility and providing quality child care for working parents, according to Edwards.
The $90 billion it will cost to do all of that can be funded by re-evaluating ‘‘excessive” tax cuts, said Joy Moses, a policy analyst with The Center for American Progress Action Fund, one of the partnering organizations, in an interview Tuesday.
Edwards said he has no plans to stop being an advocate for workers’ rights and told graduates they should be doing the same.
‘‘We are in the fight of our lives to restore dignity and honor to those who actually work,” Edwards said. ‘‘More people ought to have the same chances I had.”
