McElroy detailed many of the immediate and long-term threats facing each constituency of the union. The White House is pressuring the National Labor Relations Board to strip nurses’ union rights. Higher education is reeling from attacks on academic free speech.

Public employees have seen governors in Indiana, Kentucky and Missouri steal their rights to union representation. Paraprofessionals are vulnerable to budget attacks circulating through states that would force cuts in vital health, guidance and school services that teachers and students rely on.

And then there are the broad, overarching issues that put the AFT and labor in the crosshairs, McElroy stressed. The current administration’s economic policies “have led to a widening gulf between the very rich and the very poor—and they have left many in the middle class teetering toward the latter.” The White House also is behind plans to destabilize and privatize Social Security, and “now there is another threat to retirement security—the collapse of ­pension promises.”

These attacks can only be stopped, he said, if each and every union member is willing to stand up and be counted.

And they did.

McElroy called out the duties that individual union activists accept on a daily basis—from volunteer organizer to precinct walker in a political campaign. He asked the thousands of delegates gathered to stand up and be recognized if they had ever taken on these challenges for their union. One by one, groups of delegates rose to their feet until virtually every seat was empty and the hall was filled with standing, cheering AFT members.

“You and your colleagues who do this work each and every day, you are the power of this union,” McElroy told thousands of AFT members before him. “You fight the fights, you win the victories. We all need to go out and enlist more members into your kind of activism because so much depends on the members of their union saying, ‘Count Me In!’”

Broad, grass-roots activism shows the union’s true colors and exposes the bogus charge that labor is a self-interested group with a narrow agenda.

“Unions are built by activists and volunteers,” McElroy said. “Members get inspired by common values we believe in, a moral center, a cause.

“There are times when a union must act. This is one of those times.”

Volunteers and activists built the AFT’s past, and they still hold the key to the union’s future, McElroy stressed. He mentioned several projects started over the past two years that exemplify this spirit, including ­Activists for Congressional Education (ACE), which builds relationships between members and their Capitol Hill representatives; and the AFT e-Activist program, which uses technology to quickly connect members to Congress.

Although external threats abound, one of the biggest threats to the union’s future is entirely in our hands.

“Frankly we have lost some of that activism as we have relied less on members and volunteers and become bigger, more structured and dependent upon union staff. We have to make sure that members don’t look at union membership more as a service than as a way to be part of a cause.

“We are going to continue to develop this grass-roots political mobilization,” McElroy pledged. “There is no other way to achieve what our union needs to do.”