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Working America, Union Members Speak Out on Need for Jobs
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While top leaders from government, business and labor gathered yesterday at the White House, grassroots union members and struggling families held their own job summits across the country.
In roundtable discussions in Ohio, Minnesota and New Mexico, members of the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate, Working America, joined union members to discuss the continuing challenge of high unemployment and the need to start creating new jobs.
Working America member Pablo Trujillo hosted a roundtable discussion at his home in Albuquerque and said the jobs crisis must be addressed for today’s workers so we can build a stronger economy for generations to come:
We need to be vigilant in the actions we take as a community. The economy is one of those actions we need to focus on, not only for the present but for the future of New Mexico. I want to see my grandchildren grow up with opportunities and be able to prosper.
Bruce Bostick, who attended a roundtable in Columbus, Ohio, said he had to take early retirement from his job, and he’s seeing similar challenges facing friends, family and neighbors:
For all the people I know, we have been facing an emotional as well as an economic depression for a long time now. The problems we are seeing are a result of an approach by politicians of redistributing wealth upward. The upward redistribution is now greater than it has ever been. We need to produce jobs for Main Street.
Through door-to-door visits and the Unemployment Lifeline, Working America has been reaching out to families in economically distressed areas and workers struggling with the jobs crisis, helping them deal with immediate needs and mobilizing them behind action to create jobs.
The AFL-CIO has proposed a five-point plan to create jobs and rebuild a strong, fair economy:
- 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.
- Put people to work doing the jobs we need done in our communities.
- Put the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to work for Main Street by increasing lending to small and medium-sized businesses.
These steps will help give people the paychecks—and the confidence—they need to get our economy moving again. In Ohio, Minnesota and New Mexico, workers get it: we must create good jobs now.
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3 Comments
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How interesting that the AFL-CIO’s five-point plan (in common with the SEIU’s nine-point plan) excludes the one item that used to be described by labor as “not only possible but essential” — the reduction of the hours of work. Here’s what AFL-CIO resolution no. 160 said about shorter working time fifty years ago:
“Unless some of the benefits of the accelerating rate of technical advance are taken in the form of shortening of time at work, rather than in reduction of number of employees, unemployment will mount steadily. The technological progress is making shorter hours not only possible but essential.”
And:
“without a reduction in hours as a key element in an anti-unemployment program, the other measures we can realistically expect to be taken are not adequate to the task of controlling unemployment in an economy with as high a rate of technological advance as ours.”
Fifty years later… silence.
In 1927, Nation editor Henry Mussey wrote: “No student of American labor history can fail to be struck with the extraordinary importance of the eight-hour issue in union thinking during the formative years of the American Federation of Labor.”
In 1989, Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had been chairman of the 1959 Senate Special Committee on Unemployment Problems wrote, “”Although this committee considered the proposal to reduce work hours, it was not recommended because the committee members felt that other remedies ought to be tried first.” They tried those other remedies. The core unemployment rate continued to creep up. Living standards of working people crept down. Deficits mounted. Union density declined. And shorter working time disappeared from the agenda of organized labor, almost without a trace.
There is more to this story — a failed political and economic strategy that organized labor embraced and continues to follow instead of the demand for shorter hours. It was Leon Keyserling’s “guns and butter” panacea. Somehow, we always ended up with more guns and more debt but less butter. It is not sustainable and it is addictive.
Breaking that unsustainable addiction will require political will, courage and determination. But turning away from one policy option upon which the U.S. labor movement was founded a century and a half ago demonstrates none of those characteristics.
i appreciate Brother “sandwichman” comments about the need for shorter work hours and would add at no loss of pay. Would also note that since Bush and Company couldn’t directly dismantle Medicare and Social Security the Obama Administration and the capitalist politicians of the Democratic party are about to cut deeply into home health care services for the aged and disabled something that Bush and Company could not have gotten away with. So there will be plenty of jobs being created with nursing home warehouses to stockpile the declining seniors and disabled unable to get their needs met at home.
The AFL-CIO has proposed a five-point plan to create jobs and rebuild a strong, fair economy:
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. Put people to work doing the jobs we need done in our communities.
5. Put the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to work for Main Street by increasing lending to small and medium-sized businesses.
I’d like to add a few more points of my own to the plan.
6. Prevent the hiring of illegals by making E-Verify permanent and mandatory for ALL employers.
7. Rescind all H-1B Visas and replace those workers with US citizens and/or legal residents.
8. Suspend ALL ‘foreign worker’ visas. Americans need jobs. We can’t afford ‘cheap’ foreign labor.
9. Suspend legal immigration. People moving here from other countries and subsequently looking for work at a time when an estimated fifteen million Americans are unemployed merely adds to the problem.
Time’s are tough all over. This is a global recession. America cannot ‘bail out’ the world. The government of the United States of America should, first and foremost, concern themselves with the well being of the citizens of this country. They owe us for putting them in power in the first place!