The Government Can Create Jobs
The Republicans keep saying the government can’t create jobs. That’s baloney.
Tens of thousands of unemployed Americans were glad to find work under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era New Deal programs of the 1930s. Their labor benefited the whole country, too.
They earned paychecks from Uncle Sam for constructing or improving streets, roads, highways, airports, courthouses, city halls, schools, post offices, libraries, fire stations, baseball and football stadiums, jails, state armories, band shells and parks. They planted trees, fought soil erosion and brought electricity to even the remotest farms.
They wrote history books and travel guides. They painted murals in public buildings, put on plays and concerts and taught people to read.
They were proud of their work, much of which survives, including the Works Progress Administration-built McCracken County courthouse in Paducah, Ky., where I teach history at the local community and technical college. (My grandfather and uncle were part of WPA crews that cleaned up Paducah after the Great Ohio River flood of 1937.)
Right-wing Republicans of old said FDR was a “socialist” because he believed Read the rest of this entry »
Social Security Fearmongering
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When the report by the Social Security Board of Trustees came out last week, it found Social Security is strong for the long term. But that’s not what you’d hear from some corporate media outlets. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) points out that CNN coverage has been especially egregious, with Wolf Blitzer asserting that Social Security has reached “the financial tipping point.”
Other CNN talking heads painted a similar dire picture. We know they have cushy retirement pensions—why do they want to kill retirement funding for the more than 64 percent of America’s retirees who depend upon Social Security as their sole source of income? FAIR is urging people to contact CNN’s Situation Room and tell them what we think about their coverage: situationroom@cnn.com.
75th Anniversary of National Labor Relations Act: Unions the Answer Then and Now
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In this crosspost from Huffington Post, U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis reaffirms the importance of the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers freedom to form unions.
July 5 marked the 75th anniversary of the National Labor Relations Act—also known as the Wagner Act—one of the lesser known, but key components of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In addition to Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, a federal minimum wage and laws regulating child labor—all controversial concepts at the time that we now take for granted as basic elements of fairness—the New Deal included the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) which protected workers’ rights to join or form unions and engage in collective bargaining.
The NLRA was signed into law when our nation was in the grip of the Great Depression. At a time when the economy was spinning out of control, some critics were hesitant about a law that empowered workers. Sound familiar?
The Tea Party Isn’t Union Friendly
Here’s what a commenter posted recently at the AFL-CIO Now blog:
I am a progressive democrat, former member of three unions and my run was heavily funded by unions. I was beaten by a right-wing Republican because rank-and-file union members voted for my opponent.
And:
Until union members stop drooling over Glenn Beck and his ilk, unions will continue to be rendered impotent.
What was it the immortal Pogo said? “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
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.
Health Care Kumbaya
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| Protest against health insurers need to have both a union and community face—like this march both against foreclosures and for the Employee Free Choice Act earlier in March in Lynn, Mass. |
The peasants are filing their pitchforks to a fine point in anticipation of an attack on the palace—and the target of their ire is not what we might have intended. At this critical moment in the health care debate, more than a few working folk are taking a suspicious look at the health care reform efforts of Senate Democrats, President Obama—and their own unions. A headline in my local newspaper, the Lynn Item, helped stir the tempest: “Obama Open to Taxing Benefits to Fund Reform.”
Vincent Panvani of the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) warns:
If any of these Democratic Senators vote for this, they’ll be out in 2010, and it will be used against Obama….[Y]ou’re taxing the middle class.
Teamsters President James Hoffa calls taxing health care benefits “the poison pill that will kill reform.” The Laborers have attack ads at the ready. And Donna Smith, an organizer and legislative representative for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) notes that insurance companies continue discriminatory rates for older workers and ongoing rescissions of benefits—that is, targeting people with more than 1,400 medical conditions for “opposition research” investigations so their benefits can be cut off. “Ugly stuff,” she puts it. (At a health care forum in Lynn, Mass., last week, Rep. John Tierney reported that in congressional hearings he asked every insurance company if they would stop these viscous targeted rescissions—each one said “No.”)
Unemployed Workers Have Lifeline Because of Frances Perkins’ Legacy
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With U.S. unemployment at 8.5 percent in March, the highest rate in 25 years, more than 6 million Americans are making ends meet because of the idea and determination of the nation’s first female Cabinet member, Frances Perkins, a “canny but little-known social worker” who became President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s labor secretary during the Depression.
In a Point of View guest column at the AFL-CIO website, Kirstin Downey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post, says the vital need for many New Deal programs is especially clear now as we struggle through our current economic crisis.
Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, says Perkins and Roosevelt “propelled into existence” the unemployment insurance system, part of the package of social safety proposals born in the New Deal, including Social Security. Perkins brought her drive and commitment to the effort, and Roosevelt won the political support that allowed the package to pass, Downey says.
Smithfield, Republic Wins Signal New Era—If We Act
Two victories by America’s workers last month are a harbinger of a new era dawning this year, writes Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College. At Republic Windows & Doors in Chicago, workers waged a six-day sit-in at the plant to demand back pay and benefits after management announced the plant would close. The workers, members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), won a $1.75 million settlement.
At the Smithfield packing plant in North Carolina, workers defied years of massive employer harassment when more than 2,000 of them voted for union representation by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). As journalist David Bacon writes in The American Prospect:
That stunning reversal set off celebrations in house trailers and ramshackle homes in Tar Heel, Red Springs, St. Pauls, and all the tiny working-class towns spread from Fayetteville down to the South Carolina border.
