Trumka at Netroots Nation: New Industrial Policy for a Globalized World
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka laid out a 21st century U.S. economic policy at today’s lunchtime keynote session at Netroots Nation before a diverse crowd of 2,000 progressive political activists. Restoring the nation’s middle class in part means returning to a “real economy”—one in which we make things, rather than move around complex financial products, Trumka said. Strengthening U.S. manufacturing must be part of the process to reverse five decades of stagnating wages.
We have to think big and we have to go big. We have to let go of this notion that we can’t compete in this world. We can compete. Other countries are already doing this and so can we. We can’t get left behind.
Speaking as part of a panel on Building a Progressive Economic Vision, Trumka outlined the need for the the nation to invest in infrastructure, implement fair trade policies, change our tax policies, enact comprehensive immigration reform and reform our broken labor laws. The full panel included consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren, progressive Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, Center for Community Change Executive Director Deepak Bhargava, Green for All’s Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins and National People’s Action Executive Director George Goehl. (Watch it here.)
Trade Experts: Renegotiate NAFTA
Trade experts from throughout the Americas say U.S. trade policies must be completely revised and existing agreements renegotiated and agree with the Obama administration’s proposal to renegotiate part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that allowed unsafe Mexican trucks to drive on U.S. highways.
In a forum hosted by the International Labor Rights Forum, the Global Policy Network and the Economic Policy Institute, trade union leaders from the United States, Mexico, Central America and Colombia said that existing and proposed trade agreements have failed to live up to their promise and have actually made things worse.
Most Workers Lose in Global Economy
 |
|
Here is one strong reason for the Obama administration and Congress to think big about how to reduce economic inequality and insecurity in the years to come: Most working Americans have suffered steady and significant income losses that stem from current global economic policies, according to a new book.
While the effect of global trade on American workers is often measured in jobs lost, Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), argues in his new book that the vast majority of U.S. workers have been hurt by increased global trade—through diminished wages, as well as lost jobs.
In Everybody Wins, Except for Most of Us, Bivens says global trade likely cost a full-time U.S. worker earning the median wage some $1,400 in 2006. This is as much or more than what median wage-earners lost during the recession of the early 2000s. For workers on its losing end, globalization has felt like a chronic (if largely unseen) recession.
