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Win-Win: Create Good Jobs, Rebuild Nation’s Infrastructure
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As part of the AFL-CIO’s five-point plan for job creation, we’re making concrete proposals to address the nation’s immediate jobs crisis while keeping an eye on creating a sustainable economy in the future.
Investment in rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure can put millions of people to work now and improve our country for the long term. The United States has some $2.2 trillion in unmet infrastructure needs. That’s a lot of work that needs to be done, at a time when 26 million people are unemployed or underemployed.
Here are some infrastructure priorities that can create jobs now while laying out a strong foundation and offering benefits for years to come:
- Transportation, including high-speed rail, ports, transit, roads and bridges.
- School construction and repair.
- Drinking water and wastewater systems.
- Clean energy and green technology investment, as outlined by the Apollo Alliance.
- Retrofitting buildings to make them more energy-efficient.
- Improvements to National Parks.
These investments would benefit jobless workers as well as communities across the country.
Congress must pass, and President Barack Obama must sign, bills to invest in these areas. At a time when state and local budgets are strained, they need federal help to carry out infrastructure projects, and we can use existing programs and agencies to distribute funds.
However, it’s not enough just to put people to work. We need to make sure these jobs are good jobs, living up to our obligation to provide workers with fair wages, health and retirement benefits and safe working conditions. To ensure maximum job creation, we need to apply Buy America provisions to products used in these projects, to make sure the money we’re investing really creates jobs here. And we need to make resources available to train workers for these jobs.
Better schools, cleaner water, more energy-efficient homes and businesses, green technology—we can achieve all of these goals while giving people the paychecks they need to keep our economy moving. It’s a win-win situation.
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1 Comment
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The above proposals to put people to work, much like FDR, for the benefit of society and the workers themselves, unfortunately will probably not happen.
There are several reasons for this.
1. Will business corporate interests make huge profits? To make these jobs another “private enterprise” to enrich the already rich would make them so expensive the proposal would not pass Congress.
2. Private business has long ago decided, as it shipped millions of jobs overseas, that it does not want to pay good wages and benefits to U.S. workers because they can make enough profit.
3. Congress is now controlled by the Democrat Party and Obama is in the White House. The AFL-CIO spent huge amount of time, money and thousands of man hours helping get these people elected. So why no payoff to labor?
Because the corrupt Democrats, heavily bribed by corporate money, is only about ten percent “pro-labor”.
4. Another excuse by the Dems and Obama is that, after giving trillions to Wall Street gangsters, hundreds of billions for the expanding wars, etc. will whine and say “No more money left”. Also the false reason: Obama does not want to create more deficits, and is even slashing Medicare 10 trillion dollars over 10 years as part of his totally fraudulent “health care reform”.
5. The AFL-CIO is great in coming up with wish lists of things that need to be done for working people right now. So what? Merely expressing an idea, merely holding a rally and wave some signs, does not cut it with the Democrats or Obama.
The AFL-CIO “leadership”, if it is really sincere in it’s modest proposals, has in fact deluded itself and is being screwed. Because of it’s ineffective response to the current economic crises facing working people, the AFL-CIO must be considered to be an active participant in impoverishing and destroying the lives of working people.
What would be an alternative that the AFL-CIO and organized labor do today?
Remember labor history, that all gains for working people came only after serious political struggles that sometimes have lasted decades and employed many different strategies.
Some of these strategies involve union contract strikes. But also necessary is the formation of political parties, electing pro-labor people to government, education and organization through newspapers, radio and television, organization of local educational and social organizations, must now be developed to wage and effective struggle for political power to effect change in the economy.
The high standard of living for working people in the Scandanavian countries was ahieved after almost a century of struggle, despite two world wars. It involved trade union contracts, of course. But also bitter political struggle to get candidates elected, to pass the legislation for free public education through college, free universal health care, paid leave for child birth, was all essential to secure a high standard of living. Simple trade unionism alone does not have enough political power to make national changes to the economy.
What is to be done now, less than 1 year from the November 2010 election?
It is incredible, in every other major country except the United States does not have a major political party that campaigns for the economic and social needs of working people!!!
Dump the Democrats! Call today for the formation of a new anti-capitalist, socialist political party to run educated and skilled working people at every level of government, to end the corporate looting and destruction of this country.
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Obama calls for austerity in Washington “jobs speech”
By Tom Eley
9 December 2009
President Barack Obama’s Tuesday speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., which was touted as a major address on job creation, outlined an agenda that will only exacerbate the nation’s unemployment crisis.
Obama made no suggestion that the government would allocate significant funds to directly promote job creation, much less undertake any major public works program such as those that typified Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression.
Instead, Obama repeated the free market mantras that “there is only so much government can do” and that “job creation will ultimately depend on the real job creators: businesses across America.” These callous remarks come from a president who has handed over trillions to the finance industry, under conditions in which nearly 30 million people in the US are either unemployed or underemployed.
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for the full details of the article, please follow this link:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/ojob-d09.shtml