MIAMI (PAI) – Interrupted frequently by applause and occasional ovations, Vice President Joseph Biden reiterated the Obama Administrations agreement with the nation’s union movement on key goals, including health care reform, industrial revitalization and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

“I have a simple and basic belief: If a union is what you want, a union is what you’re entitled to have,” he declared to the AFL-CIO – to a standing ovation.

In his almost hour-long, wide-ranging speech, plus answers to two questions, at the packed AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Miami on March 5, the vice president built on themes that President Barack Obama briefly addressed in videotaped remarks to the union leaders two days before.

Then, Obama said that “we’ve got to level the playing field” between workers and bosses. “We’ve got to rebuild our infrastructure, fix health care and pass the Employee Free Choice Act,” Obama added. In his administration, Obama promised, “labor will always have a seat at the table.”

Biden elaborated: “We can’t fix the economy by hurting workers. But when you’re in a deep hole, you need a long ladder.”

Biden first extensively thanked the nation’s unionists for putting Obama and himself in the nation’s top offices, along with larger pro-worker majorities in Congress. He said the two would not forget it. “I joke with the president that ‘You go home with who brought you to the dance,’ and you brought us the dance a long time ago,” Biden said. Then he filled in some details Obama touched on before. Key points included:

“The National Labor Relations Act said this nation’s policy is to encourage – encourage – collective bargaining. That’s not John Sweeney saying it” he added of the AFL-CIO president. “That’s the law saying it.”

“But what the news is here is that you have an American president, vice president, Speaker of the House and Senate majority leader who agree with everything John Sweeney says. President Obama said, and he means it, that you can’t have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement. We will judge this administration’s success or failure on whether there is a strong middle class,” he stated. But it can’t get better without unions getting stronger. One way is to pass the Employee Free Choice Act,” Biden declared.

Biden did not, however, say what the administration would do to help labor get Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and nobody asked. In a brief press conference afterwards, Sweeney – who introduced Biden – said “there have been discussions for it as soon as possible” but not on strategy or presidential action for the Employee Free Choice Act. Those have occurred with congressional leaders, he said.

“Our economy isn’t based on corporations selling complicated fiscal products. It’s based on people who go to work every day,” Biden said. That meant Obama’s key goal would be to help workers, led by those hurt by the current crash. He singled out factory workers. “You can’t be a leader of the 21st century (economically) if all there is, is a service industry,” Biden told Steelworkers President Leo Gerard in answer to a question. “The reason (industrial) capacity is down is in large part because the banks won’t extend credit” to let employers meet payroll or people buy cars, for example.

“For too many years, we failed to have a White House that puts our families front and center. Bankers, financiers and a functioning credit system are necessary. But they are not our spine. Those days are over, folks,” he stated.

Instead, there must be a restoration of “the basic bargain” that rising worker productivity goes hand-in-hand with rising worker wages, Biden said. To restore that link, the administration is combining its stimulus law moves – including $28 billion in infrastructure construction announced the day before – with other pro-worker actions.

The moves Biden ticked off included Obama’s late-January executive order for project labor agreements on all federally funded construction, his executive order “to ensure that taxpayer dollars go to something other than union-busting activities,” and the Lilly Ledbetter act to restore workers’ right to sue firms for pay discrimination.

“Second, you can’t just save old industries, like autos, but (you have to be) creating new industries. You need an awful lot of steel for those windmills” to generate electricity – part of the stimulus act – “and for those high-tension electric lines, and you need linemen to string them up,” he told Gerard. The transportation projects “will need rebar, cement – and engineers,” Biden added.

“In the process, we’re looking to lay the groundwork for a stronger and fairer economy for the 21st century with $630 billion for health care” reform, included in Obama’s budget plan sent to Congress in late February, Biden said.

“We’ll pay for it by going line by line in this budget” looking to eliminate wasteful spending, and “by ending tax breaks for U.S. corporations that ship jobs overseas, and by asking the wealthiest to pay more,” Biden added, to another standing ovation.

Biden did not lay out a specific Obama administration health care plan. Indeed, he spoke the same day the president convened a health care summit in D.C. But he told Building Trades President Mark Ayers, who asked, that its general principles would be “there must be choice of your physician, portability and affordability.”

Those are the same principles the federation is pushing, according to both Sweeney and to a statement the council issued at the meeting.

Biden’s somber note about economic ills included a warning “it would take a year or more to get all of” the nation’s workers on “that long ladder” back to economic health. “But it will happen. We’ve got a ladder long enough to climb out of this hole, and to put ourselves in the position where we can do in the 21st century what we did in the 20th,” he predicted.

“We’ve got a shot here, folks – the best shot in 30 years. And shame on us if we squander it. With your help, we’ll make a better, stronger America,” he concluded, to another long ovation.