The Conservative-Created Jobs Crisis
Combine Friday’s dismal jobs report that showed the economy added just 80,000 jobs in October with recent unemployment reports and the evidence is clear that job creation is just not taking off. If this recovery followed the pattern set by other recessions, the nation should be seeing about 300,000 new jobs every month.
Why are we lagging so far behind?
In a column on MarketWatch, economist Heather Boushey writes that there is a huge gap in demand—people without jobs don’t have money to spend on products and services that would spur the economy. Add to that corporations that are “sitting on several trillion dollars in cash, waiting for sufficient customers to spur higher investment, and job seekers are still waiting for investments to trickle down into jobs.”
But conservatives in Congress—who are determined to slash government spending where it is needed most in infrastructure and in support for state and local jobs, while preserving or enhancing tax cuts for the wealthy—are doing real damage.
Jobs Crisis Forum: The Time for Excuses Is Over. Create Jobs Now
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Shonda Sneed of Yellow Springs, Ohio, was laid off in December 2009 and is about to run out of unemployment benefits. Because of state budget cuts, she also could soon lose the health care nurse who helps care for her mother who has dementia. At the last job she applied for, she was told 450 others had also applied for the same position.
Sneed and Bob Stein, a 60-year-old former salesman who has been out of work since May 2010, are two of the 14 million Americans who are unemployed—and their story is not being told in the midst of the debate over the deficit. Sneed and Stein, who are both members of Working America, spoke to a forum on “The Jobs Crisis—Moving to Action: A Dialogue Between Workers and Policymakers” at the AFL-CIO this morning.
As Sneed said:
All I want is a decent job. I want to work. I love to work. I’m scared. I don’t know what’s going to happen to my mother. I have a home to pay off.
The forum, moderated by Bob Herbert, distinguished fellow at Dēmos and an award-winning journalist, drew a sharp contrast between the policies that got our country in this economic crisis and are currently being advocated to get it out, and what is needed in order to spark a real economic recovery.
Democracy Roundtable: Right Changes Now Would Build Strong Future
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What will the economy be like in 2021? That’s the question five progressive experts venture to answer as part of an online roundtable in the latest issue of Democracy: The Journal of Ideas. Twice a year, the magazine poses a question to experts about what they foresee for the country in 2021 and posts the discussion on its website and in the publication.
The winter 2010 theme is focused on jobs and the economy in 2021. AFL-CIO Deputy Chief of Staff Thea Lee, one of the panel experts on this subject, said if we are prosperous and economically strong in 2021, it’s because in 2010 we recognized that we were on a path that was leading to greater erosion of the middle class.
The path that we were on was also undermining our ability to innovate and reap the fruits of innovation. I totally agree with the need for massive and targeted public investments in all the areas that we’ve talked about: clean energy, infrastructure, skills and education.
Workplaces Must Adapt to Greater Role of Women In Workforce
A new Center for American Progress (CAP) report released in time for International Women’s Day today offers practical solutions to help America’s workers and families meet the dual demands of work and family. (Read the full report here.)
The report, “Our Working Nation: How Working Women Are Reshaping America’s Families and Economy and What It Means for Policymakers,” calls for:
- Updating basic labor standards to recognize that most workers also have family responsibilities and need predictable and flexible workplace schedules,access to paid family and medical leave the right to paid sick days.* Improving basic fairness in our workplace by ending discrimination against all workers, including pregnant women and caregivers.
- Providing direct support to working families with child care and elder care needs.
- Improving knowledge about family-responsive workplace policies by collecting national data on work-life policies offered by employers and analyzing the effectiveness of existing state and local policies.
Biden: Strong Unions Needed to Build Middle Class
The nation cannot rebuild its middle class without strong unions, Vice President Joe Biden said today. Biden said he and President Obama believe it is impossible to grow the middle class without growing unions.
Biden, who chairs the White House Task Force on Middle Class Families, met with a panel of scholars assembled by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI) to discuss the challenges facing America’s middle class in the 21st century economy.
At the live webcast event, EPI President Lawrence Mishel said unions set standards in the workplace. Decent standards help ensure “employers are not competing to see who can make the jobs worst, but who can make the products better,” Mishel said.
