This Friday at 5 p.m., Sen. Elizabeth Warren is coming to the AFL-CIO to jin AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka for a discussion of her book, A Fighting Chance. I’ve been fortunate to have been present for some compelling book events at the AFL-CIO’s headquarters here in Washington, D.C.—Philip Levine, the poet laureate of the United States, reading from his poems about work, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, talking about inequality and the damage it does to nations, to name just two. 

But Elizabeth is special to me. And that’s because she’s been such an extraordinary person in my life, in the years since I first met her in 1997. We first worked together on bankruptcy “reform.” Like so many things that Washington insiders call “reform,” bankruptcy “reform” was a power grab by big banks and other creditors. It involved changes in the law that helped set the stage for the disaster of 2008 and the debt peonage that followed for tens of millions of Americans.  For 10 years, starting in the mid-1990s, while teaching full time at Harvard University, Elizabeth fought to stop the passage of that law and succeeded against the odds until finally, in 2005, the combination of a Republican president, a Republican Congress and Wall Street influence in the Democratic Party proved too much to overcome.

Why did Elizabeth spend so much time and energy fighting a fight no one thought could be won? Her book explains it simply—not because of politics or beliefs, but because of the facts. Her research showed, even back in the 1990s, debts to the big banks to pay for things Americans had to have but could not afford—like health care—were killing the middle class. And for Elizabeth, the middle class was never an abstraction, it was just a word for the people who really mattered in her life.

So in 2002, when the AFL-CIO was trying to help thousands of Enron workers whose lives had been devastated when their corrupt, politically connected company collapsed, and we were trying to figure out how we could get justice in the bankruptcy courts, the first person I knew we had to call was Elizabeth Warren. I remember talking to her by cell phone from the back of a bus taking the fired Enron workers to Capitol Hill, as she helped us think through the strategy that eventually won hundreds of millions of dollars in severance money for Enron workers and then, shortly after that, for workers fired from the fraudulent telecom giant WorldCom.

And most importantly, as the exploitative financial system we had fought came to its inevitable catastrophic conclusion in the fall of 2008, and the Bush administration asked Congress to rescue the banks, Elizabeth and I were both appointed to the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the bank bailout. We served together on that panel until the summer of 2010, when Elizabeth was appointed counselor to the president and began the job of creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

If you read Elizabeth’s book, you can read about the bank bailout in riveting detail. I can just say this—the issue with the bank bailout was this question: Was the goal to protect the American people from the consequence of the disaster the banks created, or was it to protect the bankers themselves from the consequences of what they had done? Elizabeth never stopped asking that question from the first time our panel met to the last time she participated in the panel’s work. It didn’t matter whether Bush was president or Obama was president, it didn’t matter whether the TV cameras were in the room or out of the room, it didn’t matter whether the leaders of Congress were happy with us or unhappy with us. That is who she is. 

Since then, Elizabeth has been a champion for working people in the White House and the Treasury Department, on the Senate campaign trail in Massachusetts and in the U.S. Senate. But you can read about that in the book. 

Elizabeth’s book, like its author, is a work of candor. She does not pull punches. It is a book worth reading by a person worth listening to

Damon Silvers