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Trumka to Launch Jobs Initiative Tomorrow |
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Tomorrow morning, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will announce a major new initiative to create and save jobs.
(Watch the live webcast at www.aflcio.org/createjobs starting at 9 a.m.)
Trumka will be part of a noted panel in “Spotlight on the Jobs Crisis” at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
With unemployment at its highest rate in more than 20 years, Trumka says America needs bold, quick action to put people back to work, in addition to longer term, structural fixes for our economy. The AFL-CIO initiative he announces will include calls to extend help for the unemployed, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, provide aid to struggling states and communities, create federally funded community-based jobs and increase lending to small and medium-sized businesses to spur job creation.
Other panelists, representing constituencies particularly hard hit by the current economic crisis, are Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change; Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP; and Janet Murguía, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza. Lawrence Mishel, EPI president, will moderate.
The Spotlight on the Jobs Crisis and Trumka’s announcement come as President Obama is preparing for the December jobs summit on job creation. According to the latest data, the official unemployment rate of 10.2 percent rises to 17.5 percent when the underemployed are included.
Tune in tomorrow at www.aflcio.org/createjobs for this critical conversation on the future of our economy and jobs.
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You can also ‘watch’(Or listen, for those of us who will be in transit) if you have an iPhone get the Ustream app and search for “aflcionow”… as far as I know there’s no way to get ustream on your blackberry or any other devices…
There must be a return to Organized Labor’s basic understanding that the standard number of hours of paid labor required to earn a livable wage have to decrease as labor’s productivity increases. The alternative is cycle after cycle of jobless recoveries expanding the millions driven out or kept out of the economy unable to exercise citizen rights, human rights, much less help the economy
as buyers.
The president must ENSURE that the unemployed, AND the underemployed and wish we were employed but gave up are
employed, not trust those who say give us money and we’ll do it.
More dollars into the economy that are not exchanged for hours of Americans working disappear in the inflating black hole the president referred to in March when he noted that when AIG derivatives make up a big portion of GDP something is very wrong.
The labor movement AND the peace movement must show the way to end unemployment and war as the only way out of
massive unemployment by insisting on pegging increases in productivity to decreases in labor hours required to earn a livable wage. What else is productivity increase but a decrease in labor time to do quicker than what’s done before, or elsewhere. We need to
expand free time, real freedom from from time on the jobAND time looking for a job. A job that includes going to school or helping seniors garden where children are free and safe to
play is as fine by me as building windmill parts for GE or Boone Pickens
I agree Peggy, I was on a job working for SGT at St Lucie Nuclear Plant in 2007 and they offered to reduce our hours to avoid layoffs in manpower until the outage was completed.They also sent a bonus check to every worker, based on profit sharing. This could be added incentive to accept a reduction in hours. Thanks for speaking out,good job
The 10-to-4 Unemployment Jobs Creation Plan (the “10-to-4 Plan”) has 17 components to re-start the U.S. economy so that U.S. consumers whose purchases represent roughly 3/4 of the U.S. GDP have regular income. The 10-to-4 Plan puts people to work in places like Braddock, Elkhart, Cleveland, Warren, Akron, Toledo, Dayton and scores of other communities where high unemployment exists because of the “beggar-thy-neighbor” “race-to-the-bottom” tactics used by those whose only concerns are quarterly profits.
The “10-to-4 Plan” is a private sector solution to a public sector problem.
I welcome the opportunity to discuss it with you and the other people who will be present at future roundtable discussions about re-absorbing workers into the workforce.
Several of the 10-to-4 Plan’s components have the potential of reducing the federal deficit by eliminating one major problem in the healthcare sector that will result in an annualized $147 billion savings. In the process of fixing this problem, we put people in local communities to work in the mining, construction, steel, concrete, engineering, manufacturing, assembly and service sectors.
The key to the discussion, and the potential success of long term structural re-employment will be exactly the way we define “rebuilding”.
The key to a bountiful green (building) economy is the reversal of the thirty, fifty, one hundred year trend of sprawl development, particularly in the United States (that’s what I know).
By rebuilding neighborhoods and reallocating goods and services to those renovated neighborhoods (made walkable, meaning that the great majority of people will be able to get what they need and reasonably want within walking distance to their homes).
Such a tremendous commitment and dedication of resources will be a boom for the building trades and will create the effect of reducing automobile usage by 80% in the next 20 to 40 years. Neighborhood, commercial, community and work/telecommute centers will be centrally placed in what are now alienating, automobile dependent, strictly residential areas, alleviating the problems associated with post-peak oil and climate change and bringing with it the neighborly qualities of life associated with communities and neighborhoods, that most individuals and families currently lack.
If we do this, we can take the opportunity to retrofit for weatherization, passive solar design (heating and cooling), electronic environmental controls, solar assisted hot water and drying systems, limited wind and PVs.
Also if done correctly, we can make changes in ownership arrangements that are much more fair and just, and work towards an equitable distribution of wealth among neighborhoods/villages.
Concerning Friends Of the Earth’s suggestion of a publicly financed economy, we would optimally transition the “private sector” to a quasi-public one working in cooperation with public funding programs. The ideal would really be to phase out the government programs as much as possible.
In Peace, Friendship, Community, Cooperation, and Solidarity,
Mike Morin
Eugene, OR, USA
Mike,
You will LOVE at least five components of the “10-to-4 Plan.”
Sunhunterwith2
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs? For whom? Trumka’s close alliance with the National Council of La Raza would suggest it’s jobs for illegal immigrants.
Shame on AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka!