Ohio AFL-CIO President Joe Rugola: Obama Is Best Hope for New Economy

by James Parks, Oct 23, 2008

For nearly three weeks, Joe Rugola, Ohio AFL-CIO president, has walked across the state to remind Ohioans not to be distracted by side issues this election season and to focus on the toll of eight years of Bush-McCain economic polices—more than 180,000 Ohio jobs lost and nearly 1,100 plants, factories and other workplaces closed forever.

Yesterday in Jackson, a town of some 6,000 in southern Ohio, Rugola saw firsthand the devastation wrought by a policy that rewards employers who take jobs overseas. Rugola talked with Peggy Nixon, a member of the United Steelworkers who lost her job at Meridian Automotive Systems when the plant shut down last year, putting some 300 workers out of a job. Nixon, who has worked more than 30 years at the plant, says she and her husband live off his disability check and “whatever we can pick up.” (See video.)

We’re just trying to pick up and start all over again. We recycle a lot. I’ve sold more pop cans than I care to mention. If it wasn’t for the union, I don’t know what we would have done.

Rugola, who began his 300-mile trek through the Buckeye State on Oct. 5, says he is walking across the state to underscore Ohio’s great need for a responsible national economic policy and a focused effort by our next president to rebuild America’s economy and restore jobs to our country. He says the nation needs to get on the road to economic recovery and is telling the union voters he meets on his statewide walk that Sen. Barack Obama will help lead us down that road.

In contrast, Sen. John McCain offers only more of the same policies that have left Ohio with a 7.4 percent unemployment rate, the highest in 16 years. Rugola says it is “a tragedy” what has happened to Ohio’s economy.

Ohio once was an industrial Mecca. There were good jobs here. You could build a life. As you go around and look at these small towns, you realize that hope, that part of Ohio is gone. It’s a tragedy to see our great industrial base undermined like this. But it makes us more determined to keep going.

Hopefully, we can get folks thinking about how we need a new direction in this country and Barack Obama gives us the best chance to do that.

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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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