SEASIDE — Presidential candidate John Edwards says that if he is elected president, union workers will have a true friend in the White House.

“I want to be the president who goes out on the White House lawn and says the word ‘union.’ You haven’t heard that in a while,” he told some 450 delegates and guests attending the 50th convention of the Oregon AFL-CIO.

Edwards, whose parents were union millworkers, says he understands the interests of workers.

“I want to be the president who explains to the country how important the labor movement has been,” he said. “If we want to improve and strengthen the middle class in this country, we have to grow and strengthen the union movement.”

Speaking minutes before Edwards, national AFL-CIO President John Sweeney told delegates that the former U.S. senator from North Carolina and running mate with John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election has marched on more picket lines than any other candidate in the race.

At an AFL-CIO Organizing Summit last December, Edwards received the Paul Wellstone Award, named in honor of the late senator from Minnesota. The AFL-CIO established the award to recognize elected leaders who take a strong stand for workers’ freedom to form unions and who fight for social and economic justice.

“John Edwards received it for doing more for labor than any other politician,”said Stewart Acuff, director of organizing for the national AFL-CIO.

The national labor federation has not endorsed a presidential candidate for the primary election. Several international unions have made endorsements, but they are all over the map. Edwards is backed by the United Steelworkers, the Mine Workers, and the Carpenters Union of the Change to Win federation.

Edwards told the convention that he supports universal health care and card-check recognition in union organizing drives.

“In my America, every person is worthy of health coverage,” he said. “I want to say to Congress and to members of my Administration ‘If you don’t pass universal health care by July of 2009 — then you will lose your health care.’ ”

Edwards said a universal health care insurance program would be expensive, but that it could be paid for by ending the Bush tax cuts to those making over $200,000 a year. “That will pay for it,” he said.

Edwards supports labor’s top priority bill — the Employee Free Choice Act. The bill, which would allow for card-check recognition and set timelines for bargaining a first contract, passed in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year, but was stalled in the Senate by a filibuster. “If you can join the Republican Party by signing your name on a card, any worker in America ought to be able to join a union by signing a card,” Edwards said.

Edwards said he supports workers’ right to strike. “When you are walking that picket line and I’m President of the United States, nobody, nobody will walk through that picket line and take your job away from you. Not when I’m President of the United States.”

On trade, Edwards said the current policy benefits only multi-national corporations. “Our trade policy has to be changed,” he said. The first change he would make in policy would be to ask: “Is this good for working-class America?” He said any proposed trade deal he signed would have to include worker rights and environmental protections “written in the agreement.”

Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain, writing on his blog, said Edwards “hit the ball out of the ballpark in his speech ... On every issue — health care, the war in Iraq, and more, he gets it. Working people are the backbone of our country, and we need to work hard to make sure that a child of a mill worker can have the opportunity to some day run for president.”

Edwards went into more detail about labor issues at the Seaside convention, but workers’ rights were just as much a part of his message later that night at the Oregon Business Alliance annual awards dinner in Portland.

“I believe we need to strengthen the right of unions to organize in the workplace,” Edwards told business leaders. “The entire world wants to know whether we, as the richest nation, are going to allow millions of our own people to live in poverty.”He told the AFL-CIO that Clinton has indicated she wants to sit down and talk with drug companies, insurers and medical interests about expanding health care coverage, but he said there should be no compromises.

“In my America, every person is worthy of health coverage,” he said.

“What people forget is that the organized labor movement built the middle class in America,” he said.

“I grew up in a family where my mother and father had health care only because of the union. What people forget is that the organized labor movement built the middle class in America,” he said.

The former Senator railed on trade agreements that unions oppose. He said the recent hike in the federal minimum wage should have been higher.