Channel: Economy
State, Local Budgets Tanking, Need Help Fast
With official unemployment at 10.2 percent, creating new jobs is a critical part of any economic recovery. But huge state and local budget shortfalls caused by the nation’s economic crisis will make joblessness worse unless state governments receive massive amounts of aid, according to a new report.
The report by Ethan Pollack, an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) policy analyst, says the recession has led to much lower tax revenues for state and local governments. Unlike the federal government, state and local governments must balance their budgets by law. So state and local policymakers are cutting spending and raising taxes, steps that will lead to lower consumer demand and more unemployment.
At an EPI forum yesterday to release the report, Trenton [N.J.] Mayor Douglas Palmer said mayors and governors could use additional federal stimulus money to create jobs now, improve the nation’s infrastructure and help small businesses—all of which would have lasting economic and environmental benefits.
Bipartisan Report Shows U.S. Must Move Aggressively on China’s Illegal Acts
The 2009 report to Congress by the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) is a call to action for the United States to move aggressively against China’s illegal moves in the global economy and to create an industrial strategy to rebuild our manufacturing base, several experts said today.
During a telephone press conference sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future, Carolyn Bartholomew said China has developed a plan to build national wealth and increase its power and influence in the world and the United States has not.
Join Tweet-a-Thon and Expose the Chamber of Commerce Friday
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Get set to join a tweet-a-thon Friday, at 10 a.m. EST, to help launch the #notmychamber campaign spearheaded by the worker advocacy group, American Rights at Work.
If you are on Twitter, starting at 10 a.m., sign the organization’s “Not My Chamber” act.ly petition at http://act.ly/1cc or by tweeting: RT @araw petition @chamberpost: The U.S. #Chamber doesn’t represent me. It’s Not My Chamber! http://act.ly/1cc #notmychamber (RT to sign!)
If you don’t use Twitter (and can understand nary a word of the previous paragraph), you can sign the “Not My Chamber” pledge here: www.notmychamber.org. Already, 20,301 people and 3,102 business owners have signed the pledge.
The Rich Are Different. They Have Jobs
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Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that got the H1N1 flu shot well ahead of millions of America’s school children, sent this health tip in a memo to its pampered, out-of-touch execs: “Resist the urge to open your own car door; let your driver do it.”
Yo, Jeeves. While you’re at it, dust around the edges of those massive CEO pay packages. Because according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), top executives at four companies that jettisoned their employee pension plans received $49.5 million in retirement and severance benefits in the years before the companies filed for bankruptcy, while retirees saw their benefits cut by as much as two-thirds.
Yet Wall Street bankers are making that cash flow keeps coming: Yesterday, writes David Dayen, Senate Republicans bowed low before their corporate masters and delayed a move by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) to immediately take up a bill that would freeze all credit card rates, charges and fee increases.
Without Jobs, the Nation’s Future Circles the Drain
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After he was elected AFL-CIO president in September, Richard Trumka traveled around the country on a listening tour. Here’s one story he heard, which he described this week as the AFL-CIO, along with several key allies, launched a jobs initiative to help get our nation back to work.
Last summer at an event in Ohio, I met a young woman who is facing this crisis head-on. Lacey, who is not yet 20 years old, wants to become a teacher. But after her dad’s factory closed and he was laid off, she had to put off her hopes of attending college to help her parents keep a roof over their heads. Lacey took a job in a school cafeteria—until the state budget got cut, and she got laid off, too.
After months in which she and her father were both searching for jobs, Lacey said she felt lucky to find a part-time fast food job that pays half of what the cafeteria paid. Lacey has more unemployed friends than friends with jobs, and, like a third of workers her age, she’s still living with her parents. Here’s what Lacey said to me that day:
I wanted to be a teacher to help children get the education they need to get ahead. But now I feel like I’m just going backward myself. I’m really scared for the kids my age. We want to work. We need jobs.
Gone with the Wind: Blowing U.S. Tax Dollars Off Shore
It turns out a Texas windmill farm developer’s request last month for nearly half a billion in stimulus funds to create 2,000 jobs in China doesn’t rank first on the audacity scale.
Shockingly for American taxpayers, and sadly for the staggering 10.2 percent of Americans who are unemployed, it doesn’t even rank second.
That’s because Washington already has doled out hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to foreign renewable energy firms. Of the $1.05 billion in clean energy grants awarded by Washington, D.C., $849 million—84 percent—went to foreign wind companies, according to an analysis by Russ Choma of the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He wrote:
The cash grants were given for the installation of 1,763 megawatts of capacity—1,566 installed by foreign companies. Using the Renewable Energy Policy Project’s own numbers, as many as 4,500 manufacturing jobs may have been created overseas.
China and Its U.S. Wind Farm Partner Promise More American Jobs
After a public outcry over China’s plan to seek $450 million in economic recovery funds to build a wind farm in Texas that would create only 30 U.S. jobs, the companies involved are now promising to put more Americans to work.
USA Today reports the companies—a U.S. private equity firm and a Chinese turbine maker—also will build a plant in the United States that will make wind turbines while employing 1,000 people. The companies did not indicate the timeframe for building the plant, which would be one of the biggest in the nation for wind turbines.
Bob Baugh, executive director of the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council, says:
It’s a start, but it just shows how far we have to go [to catch up in the production of wind turbines and other clean-energy products.]
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.
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.
Unions Can Help Create Good Jobs for People of Color
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Increasing union membership is one of the keys to creating more good jobs for all workers, but especially for people of color and those in low-wage jobs, several experts said today. Many of the 8.1 million jobs lost during the current recession have been good jobs, including union jobs in manufacturing. The jobs now created, mainly in the service sector, are less likely to provide what working families need.
In a new report released today, Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI’s) program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, says the United States has too few good jobs. He defines a good job as one with a wage that can support a family, health care benefits and retirement security. Using that minimal standard, Austin found that Hispanics are less than half as likely as non-Hispanic whites to have good jobs, and African Americans about two-thirds as likely.
