5,000 Rally in Pa.: Budget Should Not Be Balanced on Backs of Workers
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The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO communications team, Jim Deegan and Karen Gownley, sent us this report.
Some 5,000 private- and public-sector union workers came together in Harrisburg, Pa., yesterday to rally for a responsible budget. Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Richard Bloomingdale called it an incredible event because it
“wasn’t just about public sector workers—this was about ALL working men and women in our state. Today they all came together and demanded that the budget not be balanced on the backs of working families.
Gov. Tom Corbett’s recent budget proposal slashes millions from public education and other vital public services. Meanwhile, big corporations like Marcellus Shale gas drillers, pay little or no taxes to the state. As Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Frank Snyder put it:
The corporate loopholes must be closed. It is time corporations pay their fair share.
Government Grows the Economy
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Economist Jeff Madrick, director of policy research at The New School’s Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, is among several key speakers at next week’s Building the New Economy conference here in Washington, D.C. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard also are among keynote speakers. Here, Madrick shares with us why government involvement in the economy is essential to ensure a robust, successful nation.
America had been living a free-market myth for a generation until the credit crisis of 2008 and 2009 descended on the nation—and the world. One expression of that myth, found frequently on the editorial pages of the popular media, was that government does not grow economies, business does. In other words, government, don’t meddle where you’re not needed. Politicians are even easier to belittle than government itself.
AFT Mobilizes for Smart Investments in Economic Recovery Package
AFT members are mobilizing in the union’s just-launched campaign, Fight for America’s Future: It’s Dollars and Sense, to build support in Washington and back home for the far-reaching economic recovery plan making its way through Congress that helps rebuild the nation’s schools, roads, bridges and more, and protects vital services threatened by shrinking state budgets.
AFT President Randi Weingarten says the campaign
isn’t just about dollars, but about the kind of smart investments that will help slow the economic free-fall and strengthen education, healthcare and public services in order to preserve opportunity in this country.
In addition to urging their lawmakers on Capitol Hill to craft a substantial recovery plan, AFT members also are working at the local level where, says Weingarten, essential services are “too often the first on the chopping block.”
