Join America Wants to Work National Teach-In Tonight
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Tune in tonight (7-8:30 p.m. EDT) to join a live webcast of the AFL-CIO National Teach-In on jobs and the economy. Click here for the live webcast. The Teach-In is part of the AFL-CIO’s National Week of Action demanding Congress promote a real jobs agenda.
The Students Rising for Jobs and Economic Justice Teach-In also will be broadcast to dozens of college campuses around the country and will be followed by local discussions. Click here to find a Teach-In event near you. You also can follow the Teach-In on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/jobsteachin.
The Teach-In will focus on the jobs crisis and how student activists are fighting for workers’ rights, equal access to education, equitable taxation and economic and social justice.
MoveOn.org’s Lenore Palladino will moderate the Teach-In that will feature Frances Fox Read the rest of this entry »
The Perry Plan: Low Wages, Texas-Style
Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry touts his job creation record as governor of Texas, but the reality is that new Texas-style jobs are low-wage jobs. Writing on RobertReich.org, University of California, Berkeley, professor and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich says even though Texas leads the nation in job growth, a majority of Texas’ workforce is paid hourly wages rather than salaries. And the median hourly wage there was $11.20, compared with the national median of $12.50 an hour. Reich adds:
Texas has also been specializing in minimum-wage jobs. From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers there rose from 221,000 to 550,000—that’s an increase of nearly 150 percent. And 9.5 percent of Texas workers earn the minimum wage or below—compared to about 6 percent for the rest of the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state also has the highest percentage of workers without health insurance. Texas schools rank 44th in the nation in per-pupil spending.
U.S. Poverty, Home Repos Soar, 300 Economists, Policymakers Say Time to Act BIG
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Two bad economic reports this morning reinforce today’s call by 300 economists and policymakers urging the president and Congress to “redouble efforts to create jobs” through investment in infrastructure, sending aid to the states and creating public service jobs.
First, the bad news.
- U.S. poverty hit its highest rate since 1994, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2009, one in seven people were in poverty, and one in five children were in poverty.
- U.S. home seizures reached a record for the third time in five months in August as lenders completed the foreclosure process for thousands of delinquent owners, according to RealtyTrac Inc. Bank repossessions climbed 25 percent from a year earlier to 95,364. RealtyTrac sees a record 1.2 million repossessions this year, up from just under 1 million last year, with more than 3.2 million homes in some stage of foreclosure.
Such data make all the more relevent the statement by 300 prominent economists, “Don’t Kill Growth and Jobs in the Name of Deficit Reduction.” In short, the statement urges the president and lawmakers:
Public to Lawmakers: End Tax Cuts for the Rich
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A majority of the American public thinks Bush’s tax cuts should continue for families that make less than $250,000 a year but should rise to the previous level for those making more than that amount, according to a new CNN poll. Some 51 percent say the tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year, should end for the rich.
Wise. Because as Dave Dayen points out, George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are thought to cost $830 billion over 10 years, adding massively to the nation’s budget deficit. Overall,
it’s generally considered that extending all the tax cuts would increase the deficit by $3.1 trillion dollars over the next 10 years.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich is among those calling for an end to Bush’s tax cut for the rich, noting it has been a “huge windfall for the wealthy. About 40 percent of its benefits went to the tiny sliver of Americans earning over $500,000.”
A final reason for allowing the Bush tax cut to expire for people at the top is the most basic of all. Although Wall Street’s excesses were the proximate cause of the Great Recession, its fundamental cause lay in the nation’s widening inequality. For many years, most of the gains of economic growth in America have been going to the top—leaving the nation’s vast middle class with a shrinking portion of total income. (In the 1970s, the top 1 percent received 8 to 9 percent of total income, but thereafter income concentrated so rapidly that by 2007 the top received 23.5 percent of the total.)
The only way most Americans could continue to buy most of what they produced was by borrowing. But now that the debt bubble has burst—as it inevitably would—the underlying problem has reemerged.
Extending the tax cuts for the rich would exacerbate the already massive income gap between the rich and the rest of us, and so, to end with Reich:
Why make it worse?
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs Made in America
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* For months, we in the union movment have been calling for Congress to do more—much more—to create jobs. Now, the long-term jobless rate for workers is the worst since the 1930s Depression—some 45 percent of unemployed workers have been without jobs for more than six months—and calls for federal action on jobs are coming from across the nation. Check out New York Times columnist Bob Herbert here and here who blasts congressional inaction, as does his employer, here. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich puts it bluntly: We have a jobs emergency.
As Herbert says in his devasting portrait of a Congress out of touch with the suffering of America’s workers:
Call-In Day, July 13: Tell Congress to Pass Currency Legislation
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Now that the Treasury Department once again has refused to label China as a currency manipulator, it is more important than ever for Congress to pass strong legislation quickly to stop the unfair and illegal advantage against U.S. producers that China and other nations gain by undervaluing their currency.
On July 13, tens of thousands of manufacturers across the country—members of the Fair Currency Coalition and the Coalition for a Prosperous America—will join with union members and citizen trade groups in a National Currency Call-In Day to ratchet up the pressure on the Obama administration and Congress to hold currency manipulators accountable.
China’s Currency Announcement: ‘Hokum’ and ‘Charade’
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The Chinese government’s announcement that it will allow its currency, the renminbi (RMB), also known as the yuan, to increase a small amount in value is a step in the right direction. But it is inadequate to address the “dramatic imbalances caused by many years of currency manipulation,” says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
While acknowledging that the “AFL-CIO appreciates the efforts of the Obama administration to address China’s currency imbalances,” Trumka joined Charles Blum, executive director of the Fair Currency Coalition, in calling on Congress and the Obama administration to act to address the imbalance. Trumka also said the issue of currency imbalance should be on the agenda at the G-20 summit in Ontario later this week.
In a statement, Trumka said:
Chinese currency manipulation is an issue with global impact….Most economists believe that the renminbi is currently about 40 percent undervalued against the dollar. What is needed now is a commitment from the Chinese government to rectify this imbalance.
Obama Housing Plan ‘Aims Straight at the Heartland’
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As many as 9 million homeowners who are facing foreclosure or struggling with skyrocketing monthly mortgage payments could save their homes under the terms of a home rescue plan President Obama unveiled yesterday.
When the Bush economy began to tank more than a year ago with banks failing and jobs vanishing, foreclosure signs and abandoned houses began sprouting in working and middle class and even up-scale neighborhoods around the nation. The AFL-CIO first called for a homeowners’ lifeline in late 2007. But the Bush administration preferred to bailout Wall Street instead of throwing a lifeline to Main Street. Says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney:
The swift action by the Obama administration to address the housing crisis is a welcome and refreshing change.
For more than a year, the Bush administration ignored calls from the AFL-CIO and others to address a coming foreclosure tsunami. Tragically, in the months that followed, the deepening housing debacle turned millions of families’ lives upside down and strengthened its chokehold on our economy
Obama Reaffirms Support for Employee Free Choice Act
In an Oval Office interview with major newspapers yesterday, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his strong support for the freedom to form unions and bargain.
The Detroit Free Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer were among the papers that got a chance to talk to Obama about the challenges facing our economy, and Obama once again offered his support for the Employee Free Choice Act.
According to the Inquirer, Obama discounted the corporate community’s argument that workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain would be bad for the economy. The president said that, indeed, workers’ freedom to bargain was good for the long-term health of the economy.
Reich: Enact Employee Free Choice Quickly to Help the Economy
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has some advice for those looking for answers about how to make our economy work for everyone: restore the freedom to form unions, and give workers the bargaining power they need to improve their own lives.
In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, “The Union Way Up,” Reich says the nation can get out of our economic slump and on the road to a sustainable economy by passing the Employee Free Choice Act:
The sooner it’s enacted, the better—for U.S. workers and for the U.S. economy…making it easier for all Americans to form unions would give the middle class the bargaining power it needs for better wages and benefits. And a strong and prosperous middle class is necessary if our economy is to succeed.
