Eric Cantor: Job Creation Dead on Arrival
Last week, we had a great Twitter campaign pointing out how House Speaker John Boehner is failing to create jobs.
Looks like Rep. Eric Cantor has now joined the Republican jobs fail crowd, saying President Obama’s American Jobs Act is “dead on arrival.” As AFSCME President Gerald McEntee put it:
Rep. Cantor just doesn’t get it. The country needs jobs, not another out-of-touch politician.
Enough with the grandstanding, Rep. Cantor needs to get to work. Get his party to work, to do the job they were elected to do, stand up for their constituents. It is time for politicians in Washington to come together and rebuild our economy and pass the American Jobs Act now.
Yesterday, the Republican Majority Leader in Congress, Eric Cantor, said that right now, he won’t even let the jobs bill have a vote in the House of Representatives. He won’t even give it a vote.
Challenging Cantor’s statement, President Obama said today in Dallas:
Well I’d like Mr. Cantor to come down here to Dallas and explain what in this jobs bill he doesn’t believe in. Does he not believe in rebuilding America’s roads and bridges? Does he not believe in tax breaks for small businesses, or efforts to help veterans?
Come tell Dallas construction workers why they should be sitting home instead of fixing our bridges and our schools.
Come tell the small business owners and workers in this community why you’d rather defend tax breaks for millionaires than tax cuts for the middle class.
Take action and tell Cantor—America Wants to Work. Tweet this:
Another #jobsfail. @EricCantor wants to kill American #Jobs Act. Tell him we #want2work.
Corporations Backing New Trade Deals Outsourced 18,600 Jobs
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Congress will soon consider three so-called free trade agreements (FTAs) between the United States and Korea, Colombia and Panama. Yet because these agreements do not include sufficient protections for workers, passage of these pacts would be a job-killing move at a time when more than 26 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work. The proposed Korea trade deal would cost an estimated 159,000 U.S. jobs alone, according to trade experts who have studied the deal, and its loopholes could open the doors for goods made in China or even sweatshops and North Korea, but labeled in South Korea. (Join the union movement in a national call-in day Oct. 4 to urge lawmakers to vote down these bad trade deals. Watch for more info here in coming days.)
Yet, while corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash and not creating jobs, they’re twisting the knife further into the corpse of the U.S. economy with a new ad campaign pushing for passage of these three deals. And guess what? Some of the 32 corporations backing the campaign have shipped a combined 18,600 U.S. jobs overseas since 2001.
A new searchable database at Public Citizen shows the dirty details. In one case, Whirlpool took Read the rest of this entry »
Black Foreign-Born Workers Have Highest Jobless Rate
A new study dispels the myth that immigrant workers are taking good-paying jobs away from American-born workers. According to “The Low Wages of Black Immigrants,” released last week by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), black workers, whether they were born in the United States or in a foreign country, have the highest unemployment rate, period.
In the United States, the black unemployment rate in July was 15.9 percent, compared with an overall rate of 9.1 percent. The 12.4 percent jobless rate among black immigrant workers last year was slightly higher than for Hispanic immigrants (11.3 percent) and significantly higher than for white (7.4 percent) and Asian immigrants (7.3 percent).
Republicans Use ‘Extortion Tactics’ to Shut Down FAA
The Republican shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has thrown 4,000 FAA employees out of work, and some 70,000 construction workers employed on airport improvement projects can’t go to work because Republicans have blocked funding for the agency and the projects.
In a letter to House and Senate Republican leaders, Mark Ayers, president of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), says he is outraged by the “extortion tactics” and “political brinkmanship” that are creating even more “hardship for building and construction trades families” in an industry already suffering high unemployment.
Our members expect their elected leaders to resolve their differences without resorting to ultimatums. Once again, our members are frustrated that an extreme minority has succeeded temporarily by using extortion tactics to undermine the jobs of my members.
America Wants to Work: Time to Shift Focus to Jobs
AFL-CIO union members and allies will engage in a fall America Wants to Work mobilization to move the national debate from the right wing’s manufactured debt crisis to the nation’s real crisis: jobs.
In a statement released today at its annual August meeting, the AFL-CIO Executive Council said the mobilization will use the lessons learned from this spring’s nationwide We Are One labor-community mobilization and the current Summer Accountability campaign by partnering with allies at the local and national levels to:
create a sense of urgency and focus on challenging the corporate agenda to demand jobs and investment in our communities and for our future.
The council, meeting at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md., said the mobilization will:
focus on jobs that gives voice to the jobless, including unemployed veterans, students who cannot find meaningful work as they enter the labor force and communities of color that have been especially hard hit by the recession and the refusal of corporate America to invest in job creation.
Walker Welding Capitol Windows NOW to Keep Workers from Passing Food to Those Inside
This from AFL-CIO Political Communications Director Eddie Vale who’s on the ground in Madison, Wis.
As we speak, Gov. Scott Walker & the Senate R’s are literally having the windows of the capital welded shut to keep people from passing food into the building to the people inside.
Our attorneys are collecting affidavits from the people who witnessed this, along with people who have been illegally denied access to a public, government, building.
We will be filing for a TRO [temporary restraining order] to open the Capitol.
It is a sad for democracy when Governor Walker and his R Senate allies are locking the people of Wisconsin out of their own state capitol.
Tell Whirlpool: ‘Keep It Made In America—Save Our Jobs’
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The Whirlpool Corp. makes a big deal of its concern for the environment and the poor. But now, the company is about to throw 1,100 workers at its Evansville, Ind., refrigerator plant onto the streets and move their jobs to Mexico, where labor and environmental laws are weaker.
You can show solidarity with the Whirlpool workers, most of whom are members of IUE-CWA, by signing an online petition urging Whirlpool to reverse its decision and Keep It Made in America: Save Our Jobs. Click here to sign the petition.
Working More, Getting Paid Less
Productivity rose 8.1 percent in the third quarter, the largest gain since 2003, as employers pile more on their staff. Meanwhile, pay is stagnating and worker stress increasing because of the larger workloads and the constant fear of being thrown out of a job to join the more than 15 million workers officially unemployed.
A Los Angeles Times story points to how rising productivity, while good for the economy, is not benefiting America’s workers. According to Thomas A. Kochan, a professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, productivity gains are troubling because so far,
they haven’t been accompanied by wage increases….The threat of outsourcing has also made employees more reluctant to press for higher wages, he said, when they know that if they push too hard, their jobs could disappear.
The result?
Anxiety is rippling across the workplace. A survey by CareerBuilder released last month indicated that a quarter of employers rated their employees’ morale as low. Nearly half of employees said their workload had increased in the last six months, and 40% said their stress level at work was high. About one in five workers surveyed were dissatisfied with their work-life balance.
Read the full article here.
Where Things Are Made
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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is a key speaker at tomorrow’s Building the New Economy conference here in Washington, D.C. United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard and economist Jeff Madrick also are among the keynote speakers.
To our nation’s peril, the free trade orthodoxy continues to ignore a fundamental economic fact: It matters where things are made. Over the past decade, the U.S. industrial base has suffered an unprecedented decline. The loss of more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and the closure of over 50,000 manufacturing facilities have undermined our nation’s technical capacity to innovate and to make things, while at the same time decimating our middle class.
Anti-Worker Group Pays Rove $100,000 to Fight Employee Free Choice
Here we go again. Yet another misleadingly named, corporate-funded front group has been created to block the freedom to form unions and bargain and scare people away from the Employee Free Choice Act. And where there are big corporate dollars and smear campaigns, you can bet that repudiated and disgraced political hacks like Karl Rove can’t be far behind.
This time, reports Think Progress, the “Economic Freedom Alliance” (EFA) is paying the checks to Rove. The EFA, a new corporate front organization “partnering with a number of Midwestern statewide employer organizations,” has paid Rove, George W. Bush’s sometime top political operative, $100,000 this year for his services as a high-priced consultant to their disinformation campaign.
The EFA, with Rove’s assistance, is using websites, billboards and other tactics to try and pressure U.S. senators to vote against the Employee Free Choice Act. It’s another desperate attempt, fueled by a big bankroll, to block real change for working people. (Sounds familiar, huh?) The corporations who fund the EFA and line Rove’s pockets know the Employee Free Choice Act would give workers—not their bosses—the choice about how to form a union and bargain for their fair share.
