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Some Jobs Taxpayers Don’t Need to Buy
United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard will join AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other union and national leaders today to meet with President Barack Obama at the White House jobs summit.
Can’t buy me love
Everybody tells me so
Can’t buy me love
No, no, no, no—From the 1964 John Lennon/Paul McCartney song “Can’t Buy Me Love.”
Maybe you can’t buy love, but you can buy a job.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. And the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February created jobs to relieve what is now 10.2 percent unemployment.
Both came at the cost of taxpayer dollars. Now, as labor and business leaders, economists and politicians gather Dec. 3 for President Obama’s jobs summit, some are calling for a second stimulus. These include Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. He says the initial stimulus was too small and insufficiently focused on jobs.
Krugman recommends instituting a reduced version of FDR’s WPA, offering public-service employment, the kind that left solid bridges, bus shelters and other monuments that serve citizens to this day across this country. An investment of $40 billion a year for three years, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates, would create a million jobs. Krugman also endorses the EPI’s recommendation of tax credits for employers.
A second stimulus is completely reasonable at a time when there are six unemployed Americans for every job opening and when it takes an average of six months for an unemployed worker to find a job, the longest since the Great Depression. But the Obama administration already has sent out signals that it doesn’t want jobs summit solutions to worsen the federal deficit.
Fine. There are ways to create jobs that taxpayers don’t need to buy. One is to enforce and strengthen trade policy.
Chicken Littles all over this country ran around screaming, “A trade war is coming! A trade war is coming!” in September when President Obama enforced trade law by imposing tariffs on Chinese tires being dumped in this country. That flood of Chinese tires had cost 5,000 American workers their jobs.
The Chicken Littles, always wrong, were mistaken about a trade war. China never engaged in one. And now, Cooper Tires has announced a $10 million expansion of its Findlay, Ohio, plant, creating 100 new jobs. And tire factories across the country have increased hours.
By contrast, a paper manufacturer, NewPage, filed a trade case in 2006 seeking protection against Chinese and Indonesian dumping of coated paper, the heavy kind used in brochures and annual reports. The U.S. Commerce Department found egregious dumping, but later the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) refused to impose sanctions because it decided the U.S. industry hadn’t been injured.
Three years later, the USW has joined NewPage and two other paper companies in filing another trade case regarding coated paper. Perhaps since 7,000 U.S. paper workers now have lost their jobs, the ITC will see injury to the American industry.
But here’s the thing: Why do American workers and industries have to suffer? Our trade laws should be strong enough to prevent that harm in the first place. And that doesn’t cost a dime.
Another obvious way to create good, family-supporting jobs that don’t have to be bought is to develop an industrial strategy for this country. The idea of a strategy is to design a way to rebuild manufacturing as a base of the U.S. economy.
America cannot depend on housing or high-tech or financial bubbles. These false financial mechanisms have led to nothing but heartache, recession and job loss. A strong economy is based on taking raw materials, adding creativity, energy and work to construct products—like steel and tires and glass. Those products have real value and can be sold to make real wealth. They are not risky bets on the market like credit default swaps.
We need to place our faith in our own ingenuity and industry as a country, our ability to research and develop creative new products and manufacture them here, at home. For the love of country, that’s what we can buy. And should.
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3 Comments
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It is ridiculous to talk about spending billions to create jobs while we are still importing foreign workers into the US. The US allows over 1 million LEGAL immigrants into the US annually, tolerates 12-20 million illegal aliens already in the US, and passes out about 125,000 work permits a MONTH. Simply stop the conveyor belt of foreign workers into the US and deport those here illegally, then more jobs will be available for US workers. Simple, clean, and FREE!
It seems to me the problem isn’t people coming into the US that is causing the problem. Jobs, pay and benefits are not gifts from some enlightened management. Corporations and large companies send their capital where the greatest profits are, thus the jobs go elsewhere. The only way I can see to deal with this is raising the wages and benefits in other countries to a point where it is just as practical to keep jobs here. This will require global labor solidarity. Cooperating and working together will get all of us a lot farther than bickering and calling names. In solidarity with all those who fought for, bled for, died for what we have gained from the employers no matter what nation or ethnicity. Organize China – it’s already starting!
A few common sense ideas: 1. drop retirement back down to 63. 2. Lower medicare eligibilty down to 50. 3. And the most important: QUIT LETTING foreign countries use tariff levels that don’t match the tariff levels of the US. For example China has an average of 22 % tariff on USA goods going into China. While the Chinese goods coming into the USA have an average level of 3%. 4. Tax breaks for AMERICAN companies hiring in the US. TAX hits for those that export jobs – the exact opposite of what is happening today. 5. Create a works program that actually employs and pays the person that does the work. After Katrina the average job was bid out at $185 an hour. It passed from 1 company to the next to the next – all taking their cut for CREATING NOTHING – and when the work was finally done the worker made $8-10 an hour. FDR and Harry Hopkins hired 3 million workers in 6 weeks and paid them prevailing wages for 30 hours a week with 3% overhead – not the 90% overhead of Katrina. But hey then we’d cut into the multi-national corporations illegitimate profits – and therein lies the crux- and also why Obama will NOT DO ANYTHING approaching a sensible trade policy/ manufacturing/industrial policy. Obama is a collossal failure as of right now in regards to the working people of this country that actually produce something of value – but if you are a vampire banker creating NOTHING of value Obama’s your man. Which is why looking Obama’s Job Summit Leo Gerard must have felt pretty lonely. Keep up the good work Mr Gerard! Heck maybe MR GERARD should run for President of the USA not just the AFL-CIO!