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.
Holt Baker: Employee Free Choice, Health Care Key Priorities
 |
|
The Obama administration should make labor law reform and affordable, available health care top priorities when it takes office in January, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told two key members of the incoming Obama administration and community leaders from across the country.
Speaking at a roundtable today in Washington, D.C., on “Realizing the Promise: A Forum on Community, Faith and Democracy,” Holt Baker outlined the major changes needed to turn America around for working people. Roundtable participants included Melody Barnes and Valerie Jarrett, two top advisers to President-elect Barack Obama. Barnes has been designated as director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council. Jarrett, who is co-chairing the transition, will be a senior adviser in the Obama White House.
Holt Baker told the more than 2,000 community leaders participating in the forum labor laws that deny workers the freedom to form unions and the high cost of health care are “undermining everything we need to be doing.”
