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Trumka: Jobs Crisis—Fix It Now |
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Today at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other leaders joined together to call for urgent action to create jobs and rebuild the economy.
In a live webcast panel discussion, the consensus was clear: Without quick action, an entire generation could be mired in economic turmoil. The nation can, and must, put people back to work—while addressing critical needs for the future of our communities.
The scale of the jobs crisis is obvious: Since the beginning of the recession, more than 8 million jobs have been lost. The official unemployment rate is at 10.2 percent, with more than 26 million unemployed or underemployed. These figures are even more severe among African American and Latino communities. Young people are at risk of permanently stunted opportunity, and the jobs crisis is rebounding throughout the country with increased hunger and poverty, massive numbers of home foreclosures and diminished access to health care.
In addition to Trumka, participants in today’s discussion included NAACP President Benjamin Jealous; National Council of La Raza (NCLR) President Janet Murguia; Leadership Conference on Civil Rights President (LCCR) Wade Henderson; and Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change. EPI President Larry Mishel moderated the conversation, which Jealous called the beginning of a national human rights movement for economic opportunity.
Trumka laid out five critical points that must underlie a new jobs agenda:
- Extend the lifeline for jobless workers.
- Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems.
- Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services.
- Fund jobs in our communities.
- Put TARP funds to work for Main Street.
Trumka said that the coalition will push the White House and Congress to act on these recommendations immediately, starting at President Barack Obama’s Dec. 3 Jobs Summit.
We can not afford to do nothing, Trumka said, and we can’t afford to go back to an economy built on stagnant wages, inequality and consumer debt. We need to create good jobs that support families and communities.
Henderson said the nation’s jobs crisis requires urgent attention—because it’s not just an economic imperative to put people to work, it’s a moral responsibility:
Make no mistake, for us this is the civil rights issue of the moment. Unless we resolve the national job crisis, it will make it hard to address all of our other priorities.
Murguia added that we need specific programs to make sure all communities, especially those that have been disadvantaged, get the opportunities, training and assistance they need.
There are people who need work in our communities and there is work to be done rebuilding the country, Bhargava said. By investing now, we can make real, needed improvements and we can give people the jobs they need. But to do that, Bhargava said, we need to break through the “shell of complacency” around too many legislators in Washington. We need to organize communities around an economic agenda that really helps them.
All of the leaders present affirmed their commitment to building grassroots pressure on Congress to act now on job creation. Families across the country know we need solutions that are at the scale of the serious problems we’re facing and, Trumka said, they will be looking to see whether lawmakers are listening to them or just acting on behalf of Wall Street. Trumka criticized the fact that small minorities in the Senate can hold America hostage by blocking much-needed change and promised that union members and Working America members would fight hard against elected officials who are obstructing progress.
The way things are is not the way they have to be, Trumka said. We need action now to create jobs, and we have the resources to do it.
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“Trumka laid out five critical points that must underlie a new jobs agenda:
1. Extend the lifeline for jobless workers.
2. Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems.
3. Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services.
4. Fund jobs in our communities.
5. Put TARP funds to work for Main Street. ”
And here are some additional suggestions:
6. Stop sending American jobs overseas.
7. Bring back the American jobs that have already been sent overseas.
8. Make E-Verify permanent and mandatory for all US employers. No more illegals in the workplace!
9. No more FREE trade.
NUMBER 1 –
Make E-Verify permanent and mandatory for all US employers. No more illegals in the workplace!
This will provide approx. 10-12 million jobs.
“Jobs, jobs, jobs”
Who ya fightin for, Trumka? Citizens or illegals
We could put 8 million Americans back to work in non-agricultural jobs tomorrow. How? Start enforcing out laws against hiring illegal aliens. 8 million jobs, not including farm employment. No TARP money required.
So why is the union supporting amnesty for illegals? Beats me!
Wake up folks, the open borders / cheap labor lobby wants us unemployed to depress wages.
yeah, great idea. Its all them “illegals” fault that jobs got shipped overseas and you can’t work for $6/hr cleaning toilets and washing dishes. Do you people even listen to yourselves?
facts_not_fear, You are so right! Some years back there was a movie released called, “A Day Without a Mexican”. It was a spoof but it spoke the truth. No one to cook in resturants, wash dishes, provide child care, pickup trash, etc. “Illegals” are only part of the problem. They are here. Most are honest, hardworking people, who like my grandparents came here for a better life for themselves and their children. In the state of New Mexico, it is sometimes easy to confuse the legals and illegals. We need good jobs for all who want them. My own son, 40 years old, a motorcycle mechanic, is out of work. He found two jobs but was not able to keep up his house payments. Then he was laid off again. His house was foreclosed. He has lived in MO for several years and is again collecting unemployment. He is thinking of moving back to NM and staying with me till he can find a job and save some money as he wants to move back to AZ where he lived in the 1980’s and 90’s. Is there a light at the end if this tunnel?
Ah yes, the “jobs Americans won’t do” myth. Who do you think did those jobs before we had all of the illegals? AMERICANS! And Americans applied for the jobs made avaliable by the raids. Americans will do ANY job for an American wage.
There is no shortage of Americans who are willing to work. There is a “shortage” of Americans who are willing to work in terrible conditions for slave wages. That’s a good thing!
We outlawed slavery in this country a long time ago. We passed labor and wage laws, yet we allow employers access to the pool of illegal (cheap, exploitable) labor by not enforcing these laws. Is that what this country stands for? Profit for the investor, at the expense of the worker. OK, maybe that is what American stands for, but I don’t like it!
Most of the illegals are honest hard working people. No question about that at all. I have no intention to disparage the illegals, other than the fact that they came here illegally.
We have more than enough people and not enough jobs. We need to fix out country, they need to fix theirs.
By the way, we’ve sent something like 3 million jobs to Mexico. That’s 3 million jobs that Americans used to do. 3 million that used to pay taxes. 3 million that used to be able to spend money, creatin geven more jobs. Some of them would have bought motorcycles that your son could have worked on.
Outsourcing, illegal and excessive legal immigration, the trade deficit, the national debt, these are all interrelated. We’re in a perfect storm of stupidity and greed.
No, it’s the “cheap labor lobby”’s fault that jobs have been shipped overseas. That’s a huge part of the problem no doubt.
Allowing cheap labor here is not the solution. Maybe your $6/hr toilet cleaning job would pay $10/hr if illegal labor was not avaliable. Maybe legal workers would be paying taxes, they might even have insurance. An endless supply of cheap labor degrades everyone’s wages, simple economics here.
The Chamber of Commerce is all for amnesty, and against ANY enforcement of our laws, If they’re for it, it’s probably not good wor workers.
Please, don’t even talk about amnesty, we did that in 1986, it seemed like a good idea at the time but was a disaster.
By the way, it’s not just the toilet cleaners. The raid in WA was an engine rebuilding plant. You know, good jobs. Americans applied for jobs after the meat packing plant raids, and wages went up.
We need the SAVE Act, mandatory E-Verify, with ID fraud detection.
Yes, I do feel for the (mostly) Mexicans, but the solution to their problems is to somehow fix Mexico. Another conversation.
In order to prevent the disaster of further global climate change, we need to build and rebuild our railroads and urban transit systems, install wind turbines and solar power, and build the lines to distribute that power. The building, operation, and maintenance of these systems will provide many good-paying union jobs and give us a more stable economy with stable power rates.
Under the current capitalist economic system, the simplistic demand for JOBS NOW! is a demand that is not heard by Obama and the Democrats. The only concern of our greedy capitalist rulers is to more profit, more wealth.
JOBS have been leaving this country by the MILLIONS. NO JOBS WILL BE CREATED HERE THAT CAN PROVIDE FOR A FAMILY, THAT PROVIDES GOOD HEALTH CARE, THAT PROVIDES RETIREMENT, ETC. WHY ?
Because the reasonable demands of working people massively eat away and destroy profit, which is the ONLY reason capitalists invest in a business. Capitalists don’t give a damn
about the needs of workers, the fewer the better.
Did you ever notice that stock market prices always go up when workers are fired?
Capitalists don’t want to pay any taxes if possible. Thus “tax cuts” and “tax breaks” are forever demanded. Capitalists don’t want to pay for public health and public education any more than they want to pay workers a “living wage” or provide ANY benefits.
THUS ALL DEMANDS FOR SIMPLY MORE JOBS, OR TO ‘BUY AMERICAN’ IS A WASTE OF TIME AND REVEALS A TOTAL BANKRUPTCY OF UNDERSTANDING AS TO WHAT IS NEEDED TODAY.
U.S. capitalism, long in decline in the U.S. as far as working people are concerned, has now COLLAPSED. Capitalism will not be “bailed out” or reformed in any way that promotes the economic well being of working people or the interests of society.
Instead, we see the results of a run-amok gangster capitalist economy: continuous wars (profit to oil companies, military contractors, etc.), “solutions” to Global Warming that keep profitable polluters in business (cap and trade), destruction of the public health system with Obama’s “health care reform” that furthers corporate profits, destruction of the tax support public education system, etc.
THIS IS ALL WHY EFCA, EVEN IF IT DID PASS, IS BASICALLY USELESS IN SOLVING THE MANY CRISES FACED FOR WORKING PEOPLE WHO ARE DESPERATELY NEEDING JOBS THAT WILL SUPPORT THEIR FAMILIES.
What is a program to for the labor movement and working people to do?
1. No more bailouts to a dead capitalism that only enriches capitalists. The economy must be transitioned away from capitalism to a socialist economy that fills the economic needs of the people, of society, essential for human survival.
2. Thus, and end to all the wars NOW. The unending wars
for profit are taking essential tax funds away from the needs to establish Medicare for All health care, needs to establish universal quality public education, needs to shut down polluters and transition to a sustainable socialist economy.
3. To do this, the labor movement must dump the Democrats and establish a new socialist political party. No corporate funds and not corporate capitalist agendas.
4. New mass media to end capitalist indoctrination that saturates all mass media. Working people need news, information and organization that is not possible without their own
media that expresses the needs of working people.
5. Taxes must be restored, wars ended, the 700 foreign bases shut down, to reclaim the billions stolen by corrupt banks, credit card companies, housing scams, etc.
6. The entire energy industry (oil, coal, gas, nuclear, etc.) must be nationalized to end the vast problems created by capitalist greed in these industries.
The demands of Trumka above are a “wish list” without any notion of a new strategy for the labor movement, new organizations (a new socialist party for working people), or even any analysis of why the simple trade union policies of the last 30 years if continued as is, will continue to destroy the declining organized labor movement.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by mitchellhirsch: @aflcio launches drive for new comprehensive jobs and economic policy http://bit.ly/1f8JLT via AFL-CIO NOW Blog…
Building Bridges Radio: Your Community and Labor Report
National Edition
Produced by Ken Nash and Mimi Rosenberg
**************************************
Health Care Reform or Insurance Industry Rip-Off?
with
Katie Robbins, Asst National Coordinator, Healthcare-Now
and
Don McCanne, M.D., Senior Health Policy Fellow , Physicians
for a National Health Program
Democrats said the the sweeping overhaul of the US health care
system passed by the US House of Representatives would extend
coverage to 36 million people now without insurance while creating a government health insurance program. They say it will end insurance company practices like not covering pre-existing conditions or dropping people when they become ill. But, what sort of coverage will the now to be heavily subsidized insurance industry provide especially without a robust public option? Will they truly end up extend coverage to all those eligible? And, as the debate now moves to the Senate, what becomes of the single-payer option which would cover everyone and cost less?
*************************
Tax the Rich to Create Jobs for All
with
Bill Barclay, Chicago Political Economy Group
With the official national unemployment rate exceeding 10 percent and the real rate way above that, we present Bill Barclay from the Chicago Political Economy Group who presented one of the many proposals for full employment offered at the National Jobs for all Coalition Conference held in New York City Nov 13-14 .This jobs program would be paid for by a redistribution of wealth including a national stock transfer tax and
increased inheritance taxes on the wealthy - the Paris Hilton Tax.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
To Download or listen to this 28 minute program,
go to http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/37331
or
http://www.archive.org/details/BuildingBridgesRealHealthcareReformPlusJobsForAll
Building Bridges is regularly broadcast live over WBAI,
99.5 FM in the N.Y.C Metropolitan area on Mondays from
7-8pm EST and is streamed, archived and pod cast at
http://www.wbai.org .
Our website is http://www.buildingbridgesradio.org
I believe that the government is ignoring this crisis and devoting its time to other endeavers that they promised they would curtail when elected.There for people are turnning against Obama because it is obvious that he is kissing bushes ass.He has let down the people who elected him in big time and he is not improving. For example he is borrowing money to pay for a space program that does nothing for the USA and is a money machine that could feed millions of people.but does he act? Hell no. He is still delusional about the taliban attacking the USA and wideing the military when it is acomplishing nothing.Obama is so much like bush that he needs to change his name to idiot.
Repeal the free trade agreements and tax all foriegn goods coming into our country.We are importing more than we are exporting ,so that means we do not need world trade.we need to build our own products ,here at home now.
When corporations were first started, they had to prove they were beneficial to America. I suggest that we return to that. If a corporation wants to retain their corporate license, then they should be required to produce 80% of their product in America. That would return the jobs home.
The job crisis is and has been a BI-PARTISAN EFFORT. NAFTA, CAFTA,GATT,WTO. Bailouts for the same corporate swine who got us into this pickle. Wall Street rules while Main Street and Labor Leadership continue to “played” for the fool. Again, it’s been a BI-PARTISAN EFORT, we are living in a PLUTOCRACY. Begin a US LABOR PARTY WITH TEETH, organized, funded and backed by ORGANIZED LABOR. We’ll pick our spots, and run candidates in Congressional races where they can have an IMMEDIATE IMPACT. We no longer will be TAKEN FOR GRANTED. We owe this to our children, now is the time.
The biggest threat to jobs has not been addressed. And President Obama made promises during his campaign for President to eliminate the tax rewards to corporations for outsourcing jobs. Obama stated that he would remove the rewards for outsourcing our jobs, and place penalties for outsourcing jobs. We need an accurate count of how many jobs have been outsourced since Obama became President. Obama has betrayed the labor movement and all US workers. We need President Trumka to hold Obama to his campaign promises to stop outsourcing our jobs.
Trumka is playing for the chance to beg Obama and the Democrats for a crumb or two that the capitalist class can no longer deliver on. We need to split from the Democrats/Republicrats/Greens, etc. and build a FIGHTING WORKERS’ PARTY that will struggle for a government of workers! In otherwords those that produce the wealth instead of having our labor exploted by the decaying capitalists. Those on this post who complain that “illegals” are the problem only play into the bosses hands and it will benefit them if they can get “American” workers to fight “illegal” workers and therefore allow them to continue to rob and deceive the masses of this country and the world. The average MAN or WOMAN who risks live and limb sometimes to feed themselves and their families by coming here to work is only trying to survive and get back some of the money the U.S. imperialists have stolen from the rest of the world. Labor needs to get off it’s ass and start standing up to the bosses and the present pack of traitors running the AFL-CIO are not going to lead that struggle.
Just one Yes…200,000 jobs
Imagine if all we needed was one yea to create 200,000 jobs almost overnight. Who would say no? Someone has said no!
At http://www.savingpontiac.org we have relentlessly suggested that by using assets owned by Americans up to 200,000 jobs can be created overnight in America. Americans own all the assets of GM. That includes the Saturn and the Pontiac brands as well as the factories that GM has closed. Why not let a new management organizations that understands profit use these assets to create jobs in America almost overnight?
A yes from our President or a Yes from the Treasury secretary and we are on the way. WHY NOT? Please get behind this movement on http://www.savingpontiac.org! Have a great day!
As an attendee at the EPI conference in Washington, DC where AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka spoke, I was angered that not one word was said about the economic harm to the American middle class caused by the massive wave of legal and illegal immigration into the U.S. since 1990. An estimated 40 million immigrants (and their new children) have been added to the U.S. population. This unprecedented wave of immigration has diminished wages and worsened working conditions for a broad swath of the economy, even up to Ph.D. level jobs. 40 million is a significant fraction of the roughly 200 million people who could be employed in the U.S. Millions of experienced American citizen technical professionals (independent of their nation of origin) have had their careers destroyed by the controversial H-1B Visa program that was created in 1990. Sadly, unions have been largely silent about this and similar programs that have decimated union membership - because the immigrants, who are essentially indentured servants, can be bullied into NOT joining unions.
The other thing that was not mentioned at yesterday’s conference was how nations like Communist China destroy American manufacturing jobs. China has a set of trade policies that effectively subsidize their exports. The result has been the loss of millions of “good” American jobs since 1990.
I hope that these shortcomings are corrected at the next conference.
BTW, one thing that was very bad from a symbolism standpoint was that President Trumka and his entourage left the conference in a black Cadillac, rather than taking public transit like most conference participants. The McPherson Square Metro stop is about a block away. It was a beautiful sunny day. The AFL-CIO offices at 815 16th St., N.W. Washington, D.C. are about 3 blocks from EPI’s headquarters.
I listened to Richard Trumpka on “the Ed Show” where he presented his 5 point plan to create American jobs. I’ve a suggestion for point #6: the elimination of tax breaks to American owned companies that import products they manufacture outside of the Country for resale here in the USA.
On the evening of September 23, 1952, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican nominee for President of the United States, was scheduled to deliver a campaign speech in Cleveland, Ohio. That night however, his vice-presidential running mate, Richard M. Nixon, gave his famous “Checkers” speech defending himself from charges that he had received inappropriate financial gifts. Instead of his originally scheduled address, whose topic was inflation and “false prosperity”, Eisenhower substituted his reaction to Nixon’s televised appearance. The text of Ike’s unspoken speech was published the next day in the Washington Post and Eisenhower essentially “the same” speech a month later in Troy, New York. But that later version of the speech, coming just a week and a half before election day, would have had little impact on framing the election campaign.
The Eisenhower speech’s theme of “false prosperity” echoes elements of essayist and literary critic Kenneth Burke’s satirical essay of twenty-two years earlier, “Waste – the future of prosperity,” which Burke subsequently reprised in a 1958 essay, “Borrow. Spend. Buy. Waste. Want.” The particular variety of waste that Eisenhower condemned in his speech was the Truman administration’s policy of using massive rearmament spending to stimulate the economy — a policy whose single-mindedly cynical deliberateness would be revealed in 1975 when National Security Council memorandum 68 (NSC-68) was declassified (see especially Fred Block’s 1980 Politics and Society article, Economic Instability and Military Strength: The Paradoxes of the 1950 Rearmament Decision).
I want to quote resonating paragraphs from Burke’s 1930, Ike’s 1952 speech and NSC-68 and also to suggest that a profound amnesia and denial about the manifestly wasteful sources of “economic growth” massively constrain and distort American political discourse and thought — both popular and academic.
Burke: “If all our people are to be kept straining at their jobs, the duty of the public as wasters becomes obvious…
“But by expanding this principle, we find even greater encouragement. For long we have worried about war, driven by a pre-industrial feeling that war is the enemy of mankind. But by the theory of the economic value of waste we find that war is the basis of culture. War is our great economic safety-valve. For if waste lets up, if people simply won’t throw out things fast enough to create new needs in keeping with the increased output under improved methods of manufacture, we always have recourse to the still more thoroughgoing wastage of war. An intelligently managed war can leave whole nations to be rebuilt, thus providing work at peak productivity for millions of the surviving population.”
Ike: “The inflation we suffer is not an accident; it is a policy. It is not, as the Administration would have us believe some queer and deadly kind of economic bacteria breathed into the atmosphere by Soviet communism.
“This is the way a recent editorial in a great metropolitan newspaper put it: “Inflation is the calculated policy of the White House on the labor front, the fiscal front, the agricultural front.” The point and purpose of this policy I have already indicated: to fool the people with a deceptive prosperity. The method is very simple: to give more people more money that is worth less….
“There is in certain quarters the view that national prosperity depends on the production of armaments and that any reduction in arms output might biring on another recession. Does this mean, then that the continued failure of our foreign policy is the only way to pay for the /failure /of our fiscal policy? According to this way of thinking, the success of our foreign policy would mean a depression.”
NSC-68: ” Furthermore, the United States could achieve a substantial absolute increase in output and could thereby increase the allocation of resources to a build-up of the economic and military strength of itself and its allies without suffering a decline in its real standard of living. Industrial production declined by 10 percent between the first quarter of 1948 and the last quarter of 1949, and by approximately one-fourth between 1944 and 1949. In March 1950 there were approximately 4,750,000 unemployed, as compared to 1,070,000 in 1943 and 670,000 in 1944. The gross national product declined slowly in 1949 from the peak reached in 1948 ($262 billion in 1948 to an annual rate of $256 billion in the last six months of 1949), and in terms of constant prices declined by about 20 percent between 1944 and 1948.
“With a high level of economic activity, the United States could soon attain a gross national product of $300 billion per year, as was pointed out in the President’s Economic Report (January 1950). Progress in this direction would permit, and might itself be aided by, a buildup of the economic and military strength of the United States and the free world; furthermore, if a dynamic expansion of the economy were achieved, the necessary build-up could be accomplished without a decrease in the national standard of living because the required resources could be obtained by siphoning off a part of the annual increment in the gross national product. These are facts of fundamental importance in considering the courses of action open to the United States.”
It’s the WASTE, stupid. The stock market knows that the more unemployment there is, the more waste the federal government will be encouraged to buy. There is no alternative. As Kenneth Burke observed in his 1930 satire, “We have simply to make sure that the increase in the number of labor-saving devices does not shorten the hours of labor.” Even Paul Krugman has dipped his toe in that water, as had Alec MacGillis of the Washington Post the week before. Larry Summers has tipped off Wall Street that the White House won’t make any such “mistake”: “It may be desirable [to the unemployed] to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable [to Wall Street] as expanding the total amount of work.”
AFL-CIO appears to still be sitting on the fence on this one. Shame! What would Samuel Gompers say? “So long as there is one man who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.” But the AFL-CIO is sticking with the legacy of NSC-68 and its old advisor from the 1950s and 60s, Leon Keyserling. Gompers BUILT the labor movement; Keyserling engineered its decline. Go figure.
Whatever Americans want or need should be made here…and..if…and only if, WE can’t produce or make enough of what WE need or want…then WE can import it…except for foreign grown food…if we import any, it should be with strict regulations, AND members of Congress must consume it in THEIR house first!
If mankind survives and advances, I believe that people will realize that one of a nation’s government main job is to balance the need for industry to produce goods and services in accordance with population levels. This should become one of the driving forces of government.
There will be no such thing as for profit health care, or for profit energy that we need to keep us warm or cold.
..and lobbyists will be an archaic profession only read about in textbooks as part of the moral decay at a time in America where a very few wealthy people were able to use the superstitions of G-d worshipers to work against themselves and the rest of the country! American s would keep giving more to the already rich and powerful. It almost destroyed America, but reason and revolution finally overcame it!