Hillary Clinton has given her first major campaign address, calling for a new era of shared prosperity and telling workers they can trust her to fight for them.
The Democratic front-runner portrayed herself as a champion of ordinary Americans, including the squeezed middle class, working for those left behind in the post-recession economy.
She decried “corporations making record profits with CEOs making record pay” while average Americans’ pay cheques “barely budged”.
“As we have since our founding, Americans made a new beginning … we’re standing again but we all know we’re not yet running the way America should,” she told supporters at the rally in New York.
“America can’t succeed unless you succeed. That is why I am running for President of the United States.”
Mrs Clinton spoke about a lifetime of work on behalf of struggling families – and how she was inspired by her mother’s difficult childhood.
Her mother, Dorothy Rodham, was abandoned as a child by her parents, sent to live with abusive grandparents and left home to work as a housekeeper aged 14 during the Great Depression.
Thousands of supporters attended the rally on Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens.
Mrs Clinton was joined by husband Bill and daughter Chelsea in the family’s first joint appearance of the campaign.
Her team sees the rally, on home turf in a state where she was senator for eight years, as a chance to reverse flagging opinion polls.
Mrs Clinton outlined a progressive vision for the future, vowing to rewrite the US tax code if elected to the White House.
She also pledged to establish a national infrastructure bank financed by bonds.
The rally was the start of a new stage in Mrs Clinton’s campaign following several weeks of small meetings in key early-voting states.
Mrs Clinton, who has been one of the most divisive figures in American politics, lost her 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination to then-Senator Barack Obama.
The US presidential election takes place in November 2016.
