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White House Task Force to Focus on America’s Working Families |
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For the first time in eight years, working families have a place in the White House. Yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama said he will establish a White House Task Force on Working Families. Vice President-elect Joe Biden will head the task force.
The task force will be a major initiative from the Obama administration targeted at raising the living standards of middle-class, working families. Along with Biden, it will include top-level administration policymakers. The task force will conduct outreach sessions with representatives of labor, business and the advocacy communities. Said Obama:
My administration will be absolutely committed to the future of America’s middle-class and working families. They will be front and center every day in our work in the White House. And this Task Force will be one vehicle we will use to ensure that we never forget that commitment. I think it can make a great contribution to our work.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says the formation of the task force
signals that the Obama administration will put the problems of working families front and center as they take necessary steps to rebuild our failing economy, create jobs, and invest in America’s future.
Biden reaffirmed that he and Obama are deeply concerned that the economic health of working families has eroded and
we intend to turn that around…[the task force] will look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families: Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering?
In his announcement Obama said the goals of the task force include:
- Expanding education and lifelong training opportunities.
- Improving work and family balance.
- Restoring labor standards, including workplace safety.
- Helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes.
- Protecting retirement security.
Members of the task force will include the secretaries of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Commerce departments, as well as the directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Domestic Policy Council, and the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.
The task force will post online any submissions to it from outside groups and will engage in “open, two-way dialogue directly with the American people.” The task force will issue annual reports on its findings and recommendations, which will be made available to the public and will be posted on the Internet.
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See “STATE OF THE UNIONS” onhttp://poemsonaffairsofstate.blogspot.com/
A conservatively estimated 60,000 deaths occur in our country each year due to occupational toxic chemical exposures and resultant illnesses.(Leigh, et al, 2000; NIOSH; Steenland, et al, 2003). This is a disaster of monumental proportions that goes largely unrecorded. (BLS records an additional over 5,000 worker fatalities each year due to workplace injuries). It is a major and costly labor issue – costly in worker lives, and costly in dollars.
About 650,000 chemicals are in use in industry today. To date, we have regulated less than 500 of them, and most of those are woefully out of date. By comparison, the EU regulates 30,000 chemicals, and many that we allow here have long been banned in EU. Most EU businesses think that the costs of regulation are a price worth paying.
The economic burden for work injury or occupational toxic exposure and illness, $156 billion in 1992 dollars, falls mainly on families and on taxpayers; with only 27%, on average, being paid by the employer and workers’ compensation insurer (Leigh, et al, 2000).
Employers must be held responsible and accountable to create and maintain a safe and healthy workplace for workers, and held
civilly and criminally liable when they don’t.
Patrice Woeppel, Ed.D.
Author: Depraved Indifference: the Workers’ Compensation System