Each day while Congress was on its two-week spring break, some 30,000 long-term jobless workers ran out of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits because of Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), who blocked a vote to extend UI benefits.
Yesterday, the Senate’s first day back from vacation—and with more than 400,000 workers now out of benefits—Coburn was at it again, taking to the Senate floor to continue the filibuster against helping the jobless.
But by a 60-34 vote, the Senate told him to shut up and voted to end his endless diatribe against workers who are desperate for work. Coburn was joined by 33 other Republican senators who voted to continue the filibuster and block extension of UI and COBRA, which helps jobless workers pay for health insurance. Four Republicans and all 56 Democrats who were present voted for cloture. Six senators did not vote.
The UI filibuster is just the latest example of Republican filibuster abuse. It was the 50th time this Congress, the “just-say-no” Republicans, has tried to talk legislation or nominations to death.
The cloture vote means the Senate will now be allowed to vote on a short-term, 30-day extension, probably Thursday.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka calls the delay “shameful” and says Congress needs to get down to the business of a long-term UI extension.
It is shameful that such a simple and humane step took so long to implement and that Republican senators tried to win political points by jeopardizing the lifeline of hundreds of thousands of working families.
Congress should act soon to extend these benefits for a full year, so working families don’t face Republican obstruction and uncertainty every single month. The House and Senate should move quickly to reconcile their competing bills.
More than two in every five unemployed workers in this country have been unemployed for more than six months. And the situation is getting worse. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) increased by 414,000 in March to 6.5 million. In March, 44.1 percent of unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks or more.
*This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on April 13, 2010. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. I came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. When my collar was still blue, I carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. I’ve also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold my blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent. You may have seen me at one of several hundred Grateful Dead shows. I was the one with longhair and the tie-dye. Still have the shirts, lost the hair.
Good evening. Thank you, John. I will never be able to express how much I owe you and how much the American labor movement owes you. The Institute of Politics is fortunate to have you as a fellow this semester. And let me add my thanks to the Institute of Politics and Bill Purcell for inviting me to be here with you tonight.
I am going to talk tonight about anger—and specifically the anger of working people. I want to explain why working people are right to be mad about what has happened to our economy and our country, and then I want to talk about why there is a difference between anger and hatred. There are forces in our country that are working hard to convert justifiable anger about an economy that only seems to work for a few of us into racist and homophobic hate and violence directed at our President and heroes like Congressman John Lewis. Most of all, those forces of hate seek to divide working people – to turn our anger against each other.
So I also want to talk to you tonight about what I believe is the only way to fight the forces of hatred—with a strong progressive tradition that includes working people in action, organizing unions and organizing to elect public officials committed to bold action to address economic suffering. That progressive tradition has drawn its strength from an alliance of the poor and the middle class—everyone who works for a living.
But the alliance between working people and public minded intellectuals is also crucial—it is all about standing up to entrenched economic power and the complacency of the affluent. It’s an alliance that depends on intellectuals being critics, and not the servants, of economic privilege.
I am here tonight at the Kennedy School of Government to say that if you care about defending our country against the apostles of hate, you need to be part of the fight to rebuild a sustainable, high wage economy built on good jobs – the kind of economy that can only exist when working men and women have a real voice on the job.
Our republic must offer working people something other than the dead-end choice between the failed agenda of greed and the voices of hate and division and violence. Public intellectuals have a responsibility to offer a better way.
The stakes could not be higher. Mass unemployment and growing inequality threaten our democracy. We need to act—and act boldly—to strike at the roots of working people’s anger and shut down the forces of hatred and racism.
We have to begin the conversation by talking about jobs—the 11 million missing jobs behind our unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.
Now, you may think to yourself, that is so retro. Jobs are so twentieth century. Sweat is for gyms, not workplaces.
For a generation, our intellectual culture has suggested that in the new global age, work is something someone else does. Someone we never met far away in an export processing zone will make our clothes, immigrants with no rights in our political process or workplaces will cook our food and clean our clothes.
And for the lucky top 10 percent of our society, that has been the reality of globalization—everything got cheaper and easier.
But for the rest of the country, economic reality has been something entirely different. It has meant trying to hold on to a good job in a grim game of musical chairs where every time the music stopped, there were fewer good jobs and more people trying to get and keep one. Over the last decade, we lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs—a million of them professional and design jobs. We lost 20 percent of our aerospace manufacturing jobs. We’re losing high-tech jobs—the jobs we were supposed to keep.
For most of us, economic reality has meant trying to pay for the ever-more-expensive education needed to pursue a good job—the cost of a college degree has gone up more than 24 percent since 2000 while average wages and salaries have increased less than one percent. It has meant trying to pay for exorbitant health care as employer coverage went away or got hollowed out. It has meant trying to eke out a decent retirement even as the private sector shed real pensions and long-term investment returns evaporated. Meanwhile, Wall Street middlemen raked in the bonuses.
And that was the reality for most Americans before the Great Recession began in 2007. Since then, we have lost 8 million jobs when the economy needed to add nearly three million just to keep up with population growth. That’s 11 million missing jobs.
We used the public’s money to bail out the major banks, only to see those same banks return to the behavior that got us here in the first place—aggressive risk taking in securities and derivatives markets, and handing out gigantic bonuses. Most galling of all—they used the funds we gave them — courtesy of TARP and endless cheap credit from the Federal Reserve — to fight even the most modest, common sense reforms of our financial system.
President Obama’s economic recovery program has done a lot of good for working people—creating or saving more than 2 million jobs. But the reality is that 2 million jobs is just 18 percent of the hole in our labor market.
The jobs hole – and the decades-long stagnation in real wages — are the source of the anger that echoes across our political landscape. People are incensed by the government’s inability to halt massive job loss and declining living standards, on the one hand, and the comparative ease with which government led by both parties has made the world safe again for JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, on the other hand.
Rescuing the big banks hasn’t done much for Main Street. The very same financial institutions that got bailed out have not only cut way back on lending to business, they have never stopped foreclosing on American families’ homes.
The fact is that for a generation we have built our economy on a lie—that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.
So now a lot of Americans are angry. And we should be angry. And just as we have seen throughout history, there are plenty of purveyors of hate and division looking to profit from our hurt and our anger.
I am a student of history, and now is the time to remember our history as a nation. Remember that when President Franklin Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” other voices were on the radio, voices saying that what we really needed to fear was each other – voices preaching anti-Semitism and Nazi-style racial hatred.
Remember that when President John F. Kennedy stepped off the plane in Dallas on November 22, 1963, radio voices were calling for violence against the President of the United States. And the violence came—and took John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and so many others.
But in the United States, we chose to turn away from the voices of hatred at those critical moments in the twentieth century. In much of Europe, racial hatred and political violence prevailed in response to the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. And in the end, we had to rescue those countries from fascism– from the horrible consequences of the failure of their societies to speak to the pain and anger bred by mass unemployment.
Why did our democracy endure through the Great Depression? Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe. Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred. Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.
This is a similar moment. Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia.
At this moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice—whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege. And I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard. The economic elites at JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites, the more the forces of hatred—of anti-intellectualism—will grow. If you want to fight the forces of hatred, you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger.
And at this moment, the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people. We need help. We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real, sustainable economy that works for all of us.
Working people want an American economy that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly shared, and where the economic life of our nation is about solving big problems like the threat of climate change rather than creating big problems like the foreclosure crisis. We know that growing inequality undermines our ability to grow as a nation by squandering the talents and the contributions of our people and consigning entire communities to stagnation and failure. But despite our best efforts, we have endured a generation of stagnant wages and collapsing benefits—a generation where the labor movement has been much more about defense than about offense.
We in the labor movement have to challenge ourselves to make our institutions into a voice for all working people. And we need to begin with jobs. Eleven million missing jobs is not tolerable. That’s why we are fighting for the AFL-CIO’s five point jobs program—extending unemployment benefits, including COBRA health benefits for unemployed workers; expanding federal infrastructure and green jobs investments; dramatically increasing federal aid to state and local governments facing fiscal disaster; creating jobs directly, especially in distressed communities; and finally, lending TARP money to small and medium sized businesses that can’t get credit because of the financial crisis.
As we meet tonight, organizers working for the AFL-CIO’s 3 million-member community affiliate Working America are knocking on doors across our country talking jobs. We are organizing support for George Miller’s Local Jobs for America Act that would target $100 billion in job creation dollars toward our country’s hardest hit communities—to keep teachers in the classroom and first responders on the job, and to create new jobs where Wall Street destroyed them. We are organizing support for financial reform and accountability for Wall Street. We are working to counter the Glenn Beck effect and turn anger into action for real change.
But we are not just talking about how to create jobs, we are talking about how to pay for them. Wall Street should pay to clean up the mess they made, and we are supporting four ways for the big banks to pay—President Obama’s bank tax, a special tax on bank bonuses, closing the carried interest tax loophole for hedge funds and private equity, and most important, a financial speculation tax levied on all financial transactions—including derivatives—that would raise over $150 billion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The financial speculation tax would have negligible impact on long-term investors, but would discourage the short termism in the capital markets that led to so much destruction over the last decade.
When it comes to creating jobs, some in Washington say: Go slow—take half steps, don’t spend real money. Those voices are harming millions of unemployed Americans and their families — and they are jeopardizing our economic recovery. It is responsible to have a plan for paying for job creation over time. But it is bad economics and suicidal politics not to aggressively address the job crisis at a time of stubbornly high unemployment. In fact, budget deficits over the medium and long term will be worse if we allow the economy to slide into a long job stagnation — unemployed workers don’t pay taxes and they don’t go shopping; businesses without customers don’t hire workers, they don’t invest and they also don’t pay taxes.
But we must do much more to restore broadly shared prosperity.
We must take action to restore workers’ voices. The systematic silencing of America’s workers by denying their freedom to form unions is at the heart of the disappearance of good jobs in America. We must pass the Employee Free Choice Act so that workers can have the chance to turn bad jobs into good jobs, and so we can reduce the inequality which is undermining our country’s prospects for stable economic growth.
We must have an agenda for restoring American manufacturing—a combination of fair trade and currency policies, worker training, infrastructure investment and regional development policies targeted to help economically distressed areas. We cannot be a prosperous middle class society in a dynamic global economy without a healthy manufacturing sector.
We must have an agenda to address the daily challenges workers face on the job – to ensure safe and healthy workplaces and family-friendly work rules.
And we need comprehensive reform of our immigration policy based on ending exploitation and securing fairness, working for an America where there are no second class workers.
Each of these initiatives should be rooted in a crucial alliance of the middle class and the poor—the majority of the American people. And those of us in the labor movement know that we can only achieve these great things if we work together with community partners who share our goals, and with government leaders who share our vision.
Government that acted in the interests of the majority of Americans has produced our greatest achievements. The New Deal. The Great Society and the Civil Rights movement — Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage and the forty-hour work week, and the Voting Rights Act. This is what made the United States a beacon of hope in a confused and divided world. In the end, I believe the health care bill signed into law last month is an achievement on this order, one we can continue to improve upon to secure health care for all.
But too many thought leaders have become the servants of a different kind of politics—a politics that sees middle-class Americans as overpaid and underworked. That sees Social Security as a problem rather than the only piece of our retirement system that actually works. A mentality that feels sorry for homeless people, but fails to see the connections between downsizing, outsourcing, inequality and homelessness. A mentality that sees mass unemployment as something that will take care of itself, eventually.
We need to return to a different vision.
President Obama said in his inaugural address, “The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” Now is the time to make good on these words – for Congress, for President Obama and for the American people.
These are big challenges. But it is long past time to take them on. If you are worried about the anger in our country, if you don’t want the forces of hatred to grow, be a part of the fight for economic justice and a new economic foundation for America. Be a critic of power and privilege, not its servant.
Be the source of the ideas that can rebuild our economy and restore confidence in government. As students, as teachers, as workers—all of us can play a role in this great effort. Whether here within the university, at think tanks, in the government, in the press, or even working with us in the labor movement, working people need the help of engaged policy intellectuals if we are together going to build an economy that works for all.
Think about the great promise of America and the great legacy we have inherited. Our wealth as a nation and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of my predecessor Samuel Gompers, “more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”
That is the American future the labor movement is working for. Let me be clear: There is no excuse for racism and hatred. All Americans need to unite against it. The labor movement must be a powerful voice against it. But you cannot fight hatred with greed. Working people are angry—and we are right to be angry at the betrayal of our economic future. Help us turn that anger into the energy to win a better country and a better world.
*This post originally appeared on the AFL-CIO website on April 7, 2010. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Richard L. Trumka was elected President of the AFL-CIO by acclamation at the Federation’s 26th convention in Pittsburgh, Pa. His election, following 15 years of service as the AFL-CIO’s Secretary Treasurer, capped Trumka’s rise to leadership of the nation’s largest labor federation from humble beginnings in the small coal mining communities of southwest Pennsylvania.
A little more than a year after taking office, the Obama administration and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis have taken significant steps to repair the damage to workplace safety and health left behind after eight years of the Bush administration.
With Workers Memorial Day (April 28) approaching, this is a good time to look at the progress made since the “the new sheriff” hit town. (Click here for fact sheets, fliers, posters, stickers and other Workers Memorial Day materials.)
During the Bush years, the Department of Labor became a cautionary tale about what happens when foxes are asked to guard the henhouse.
For eight years under the Bush Administration, corporate officials and management representatives headed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Bush’s first MSHA head, David Lauriski, was chief safety officer at Emery Mining’s Wilberg, Utah, mine in 1984 when an explosion killed 27 coal miners. The blast, says Kaplan, “was later attributed to numerous violations at the mine.”
The owners, it turned out, had been trying for a one-day production record…Seventeen years after the disaster, Lauriski became George W. Bush’s first mine safety chief, a perch from which he halted a dozen new safety regulations initiated under [the] Clinton [administration], advocating instead a more “collaborative” approach with industry.
Today, MSHA is headed up by Joe Main who began work in the mines when he was 19, became a local union safety committeeman, a safety inspector in the Mine Workers (UMWA) Safety and Health Department and eventually is director.
At OSHA, Bush’s last administrator, Edwin Foulke, was former partner at the notorious anti-union law firm Jackson Lewis. He so strongly opposed workplace safety and health laws The New York Times labeled him “an antiregulatory ideologue.”
Contrast Foulke with David Michaels, Obama’s choice as OSHA administrator. Michaels is an occupational safety and health expert, co-founder of the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) and epidemiologist at George Washington University.
Under Bush, OSHA and MSHA emphasized voluntary compliance programs over strong enforcement of workplace safety and health regulations. When they issued penalties, the employers often negotiated down the fines, which were negligible to begin with.
Now, both OSHA and MSHA have stepped up enforcement, assessing large penalties against employers with serious, repeated and willful violations. In October, OSHA levied the largest fine in its history-$87 million against BP Products for failing to correct the safety problems that caused a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers and injured another 170 people at a Texas City oil refinery.
OSHA also is strengthening its enforcement program to focus more on repeated violators and to develop corporate-wide approaches to enforcement. It’s launched a national investigation in the under reporting of injuries and employer practices that discourage workers from reporting job injuries.
During the eight-year run of the Bush administration, not only did OSHA and MSHA put the brakes on new safety and health rules laws in the pipeline when they took office, neither agency issued any new standard unless forced by the courts or Congress. OSHA is now moving forward with rules on silica, cranes and derricks, hazard communication, combustible dust and other workplace hazards.
The Bush administration presided over the repeal of the nation’s first ergonomics standard and made it so that OSHA’s hands tied to set a new ergonomics rule. But the agency now has proposed changes in the injury recordkeeping rule to reinstate a requirement, repealed by the Bush administration, for employers to identify musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) on the workplace injury log.
At MSHA, new rules to limit exposure to coal dust and silica and to address increases in lung disease among miners are top priorities. Main also told Kaplan that MSHA will identify the top risk factors that lead to mining deaths and injuries and help educate mining companies on how to eliminate them, but not as a substitute for enforcement.
We’ll provide assistance to the mine operators who do need it, .but never as a replacement to the enforcement tools. There was some confusion about that in recent years. I’m not confused about that.
Both safety agencies suffered drastic cuts in budget and personnel (especially in inspection and personnel) under the Bush administration. The Obama administration has restored those cuts and its FY 2011 budget includes some modest increases.
Employers’ rights appeared paramount in the Bush OSHA and MSHA. Today both agencies have established programs focusing on workers’ rights, including whistleblower and anti-discrimination protections and better worker access to fatality and injury.
The Obama administration also is backing congressional efforts to improve workplace safety and health laws, including the Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067 and S. 1580), which toughens penalties, expands OSHA coverage to public-sector workers, strengthens anti-discrimination protections and expands workers’ rights.
It’s likely the same corporate and Republican forces that blocked improvements in workplace safety and health will fight this legislation and each and every new safety initiative.
So this Workers Memorial Day, along with honoring workers killed and injured on the job and demanding good, safe jobs with decent wages, health and retirement security and a voice on the job, workers will continue the fight for strong new safety and health protections.
*This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on March 18, 2009. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. I came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. When my collar was still blue, I carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. I’ve also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold my blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent. You may have seen me at one of several hundred Grateful Dead shows. I was the one with longhair and the tie-dye. Still have the shirts, lost the hair.
Recent polls show a majority of Americans want Congress to pass comprehensive health care reform now. And for good reason: There’s more news out this week about the enormous increases in health insurance premiums, according to a new report.
A survey from Economist/YouGov released this week shows 53 percent of respondents support changes proposed by the Obama administration. A second poll by Ipsos/McClutchey shows that 53 percent of Americans either support the current reform option or hope for an even stronger reform package. More than a third of those who oppose current reform proposals actually favor stronger reforms.
Meanwhile, a study by Health Care for America Now (HCAN) shows jaw-dropping insurance premium hikes—up 97 percent for families and 90 percent for individuals between 2000 and 2008. Premiums rose two times faster than medical costs and more than three times faster than wages. Companies like WellPoint are raising premiums by as much as 39 percent in California and by double digits in at least 11 states.
An analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that people who bought insurance on their own between 2004 and 2007 on average paid more of their health expenses themselves—52 percent—than insurance companies. Yet those who had employer-sponsored coverage only paid 30 percent out of pocket.
The industry front group, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), heard plenty this week as thousands gathered in Washington, D.C., outside AHIP’s meeting to stage a citizens’ arrest for its crime in blocking health care reform.
Says Kaiser Family Foundation President Drew Altman:
The recent premium increases in the individual market probably have done more to illustrate the cost of doing nothing in health reform in simple, graphic terms people can understand than anything so far in the health reform debate.
*This article originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on March 11, 2010. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: James Parks had his first encounter with unions at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. He has also been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections. Author photo by Joe Kekeris
President Obama this morning released his version of health care reform legislation that combines elements of the Senate and House bills passed late last year. The new plan was unveiled in preparation for Thursday’s televised bipartisan White House health care summit.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said working families “look foward” to moving the ball forward this week toward the goal of quality, affordable health care for all Americans. Republicans in Congress have an opportunity to stand with working families or continue to protect the profits of the insurance industry. We are prepared to work with the White House and leadership in Congress to advance a comprehensive health care bill that will be passed into law.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this morning the revised proposal “contains positive elements” from both bills. She is scheduled to meet with the other House Democrats today to review the bill further. In a statement, Pelosi said:
Our nation is closer than ever to guaranteeing affordable health care to America’s middle class and small businesses, lowering costs and strengthening Medicare for seniors, holding insurance companies accountable, and reducing our deficit. The cost of inaction is too great for our nation and for every family facing the heartbreaking reality of skyrocketing health care costs and denied care or coverage.
An excise tax on health benefits that remain in the plan has been modified even further than an earlier agreement reached by the White House and union leaders. Under the latest proposal, the tax wouldn’t kick in until the annual premium cost for all families reached $27,500 and would not take effect until 2018.
The bill also includes: higher subsidies for low- and middle-income families to help pay for health insurance: closing the Medicare prescription drug ”donut hole”; new authority to control health insurance premium increases; applying the full Medicare tax (both employer and employee share, or 2.9 percent) to unearned income for families earning more than $250,000; an increase in the penalty for employers that do not provide health benefits from $750 per worker to $2,000; increased Medicaid funding for all states; raising from $23 billion to $33 billion the assessment of drug companies; a ban on denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions. Click here for a full summary.
House and Senate Republicans who have unanimously opposed the reform bills and blocked action were invited to post an alternative health care plan on the White House website so voters could compare ideas. But Republican leaders refused the offer. However, they do say they will attend the Thursday summit.
*This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on February 22, 2010. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. I came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. When my collar was still blue, I carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. I’ve also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold my blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent. You may have seen me at one of several hundred Grateful Dead shows. I was the one with longhair and the tie-dye. Still have the shirts, lost the hair.
The White House Task Force on the Middle Class today announced several initiatives it says will help middle-class families afford soaring child care costs, care for their aging relatives, cope with the challenge of saving for retirement and pay for their children’s college tuition.
President Obama says the measures will help “ease the burdens on middle-class families who are struggling in this economy, and provide the help they need to get ahead.” The White House says Obama will discuss these and other vital middle-class issues, including job creation and health care in his State of the Union address Wednesday.
The Task Force chairman, Vice President Joe Biden, says the initiatives were developed after a series of meetings during the past year with working families around the country and at the White House.
Every day, middle-class families go to work and help make this country great. For a year, our Task Force has been hearing that they are struggling with soaring costs and squeezed family budgets. These common sense initiatives will help these families cope with these challenges.
The initiatives include:
•Nearly doubling the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for middle-class families making under $85,000 a year and a $1.6 billion increase in child care funding for families struggling to enter the middle class.
•Limiting a student’s federal loan payments to 10 percent of his or her income above a basic living allowance.
•Creating a system of automatic workplace IRAs, requiring all employers to give the option for employees to enroll in a direct-deposit IRA.
•Expanding tax credits to match retirement savings and enacting new safeguards to protect retirement savings.
•Expanding support for families balancing work with caring for elderly relatives.
Click here for a fact sheet with more detailed information on each initiative.
The Task Force has given working families and union leaders the opportunity to outline their concerns and offer recommendations on ways to make the economy work for working families.
United Steelworkers President Leo W. Gerard emphasized the need for creation of good green jobs. Members of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 730 in St. Cloud. Minn., told Biden and the Task Force that the Employee Free Choice Act was vital to allow workers to bargain for jobs with good wages and benefits. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler urged the Task Force to make fixing manufacturing a priority in building a stronger economy.
Visit the White House Task Force on the Middle Class website here.
The White House Task Force on the Middle Class today announced several initiatives it says will help middle-class families afford soaring child care costs, care for their aging relatives, cope with the challenge of saving for retirement and pay for their children’s college tuition.
President Obama says the measures will help “ease the burdens on middle-class families who are struggling in this economy, and provide the help they need to get ahead.” The White House says Obama will discuss these and other vital middle-class issues, including job creation and health care in his State of the Union address Wednesday.
The Task Force chairman, Vice President Joe Biden, says the initiatives were developed after a series of meetings during the past year with working families around the country and at the White House.
Every day, middle-class families go to work and help make this country great. For a year, our Task Force has been hearing that they are struggling with soaring costs and squeezed family budgets. These common sense initiatives will help these families cope with these challenges.
The initiatives include:
•Nearly doubling the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for middle-class families making under $85,000 a year and a $1.6 billion increase in child care funding for families struggling to enter the middle class.
•Limiting a student’s federal loan payments to 10 percent of his or her income above a basic living allowance.
•Creating a system of automatic workplace IRAs, requiring all employers to give the option for employees to enroll in a direct-deposit IRA.
•Expanding tax credits to match retirement savings and enacting new safeguards to protect retirement savings.
•Expanding support for families balancing work with caring for elderly relatives.
Click here for a fact sheet with more detailed information on each initiative.
The Task Force has given working families and union leaders the opportunity to outline their concerns and offer recommendations on ways to make the economy work for working families.
United Steelworkers President Leo W. Gerard emphasized the need for creation of good green jobs. Members of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 730 in St. Cloud. Minn., told Biden and the Task Force that the Employee Free Choice Act was vital to allow workers to bargain for jobs with good wages and benefits. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler urged the Task Force to make fixing manufacturing a priority in building a stronger economy.
Visit the White House Task Force on the Middle Class website here.
*This article originally appeared in the AFL-CIO blog on January 25, 2009. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. I came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. When my collar was still blue, I carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. I’ve also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold my blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent. You may have seen me at one of several hundred Grateful Dead shows. I was the one with longhair and the tie-dye. Still have the shirts, lost the hair.
Massachusetts voters sent a strong signal to Washington lawmakers Tuesday that they want results—and aren’t seeing any. Not on health care reform, not on job creation and not on fixing the nation’s economy.
Voters also sent another powerful message for Democrats: Ignore the working class at your peril.
Some 79 percent of voters polled on election night said the most important issue for them was electing a candidate who will strengthen the economy and create more jobs. Controlling health care costs was next on their list, with 54 percent citing that issue as the main determinant of their vote.
The poll, conducted by Hart Research Associates among 810 voters for the AFL-CIO on the night of the election, also found that although voters without a college degree favored Barack Obama by 21 percentage points in the 2008 election, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley lost that same group by a 20-point margin.
And as AFL-CIO Richard Trumka has pointed out, Massachusetts voters have the same goals for reforming health care, creating good jobs and strengthening the economy as they did in November 2008—but President Obama and the Democrats have done too little:
“Voters showed they don’t think Democrats have overreached—they think that the Democrats underreached.”
In fact, voters were not worried about Democratic “overreach”—47 percent said their bigger concern about Democrats is that they haven’t succeeded in making needed change rather than tried to make too many changes too quickly (32 percent). Even voters for Scott Brown were more concerned about a lack of change (50 percent) than about trying to make too many changes too quickly (43 percent).
These results puts a lie to the corporate media spin that Democrats have gone “too far” in pushing a reform agenda.
Nor was the election result about health care reform. Brown actually lost among the 59 percent of voters who picked health care as one of their top two voting issues (50 percent for Coakley and 46 percent for Brown). Voters for Brown (55 percent ) were less likely to cite health care as a top issue than were voters for Coakley (66 percent).
The election also should be a wake-up call for those in Washington who support taxing working families’ health care. Voters who thought their health care would be taxed voted by 64 percent for Brown, while those who did not think their health care would be taxed voted by 54 percent to 40 percent for Coakley.
Our polling results show the election was not an endorsement of a Republican agenda or a call to abandon health care reform. Voters strongly disapprove of the job being done by congressional Republicans (26 percent approve and 58 percent disapprove), a much lower rating than they give to congressional Democrats (37 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove).
Other polls show the need for Democrats in Congress to take immediate action to create jobs, reform health care, stop catering to Wall Street and address the needs of America’s working class. As John Judis wrote, the election showed Democrats have lost ground primarily among white working and middle-class voters and senior citizens.
The Suffolk University poll in Massachusetts…singled out two white working-class towns, Gardner and Fitchburg, as bellwethers. Obama won Gardner, where Democrats hold a 3-1 registrations edge, by 59 percent to 31 percent in 2008. Brown won it by 56 percent to 42 percent. Obama won Fitchburg, with a similar Democratic edge, by 60 percent to 38 percent in 2008. Brown won it by 59 percent to 40 percent. That suggests a fairly dramatic shift among white working-class voters.
Summarizing the findings from election night polling conducted by Research 2000 Massachusetts Poll, MoveOn.org said the results show voters worry that Democrats in power “have not done enough to combat the policies of the Bush era.”
Both sets of voters wanted stronger, more progressive action on health care reform as well. In summary, the poll shows that the party who fights corporate interests—especially on making the economy work for most Americans—will win the confidence of the voters.
The working class has spoken. Will Democrats listen?
*This post was crossposted from the AFL-CIO blog on January 21, 2010. Reprinted with permission.
When Royetta Sanford retired as director of the Electrical Workers (IBEW) Human Services Department, she did not stop working to improve the lives of working people. Instead, she has begun to train the next generation of union leaders.
I’m mentoring because I feel it is one of the only ways we can move forward getting women and minorities in the mainstream of the labor movement.
This is a great, well-organized program with some real bright talent, a lot of people with capacity to be good leaders. I want to give back to the movement and do whatever I can to make it stronger and more diverse.
Royetta Sanford, left, is mentoring future union leader Carrie Meyers-Herron, right.
The future leaders scholarship helps active union members who are women or people of color gain skills and knowledge to move into union leadership. Providing annual rewards of up to $3,000, the scholarship program is sponsored by the Union Plus Education Foundation, an arm of Union Privilege.
Meyers-Herron, a member of AFT Local 2665 in Palatine Bridge, N.Y., and president of the Galway (N.Y.) Central School District’s teachers association, says:
It’s nice to be hooked up with a mentor who has done union work for so long. She reassures me.
Meyers-Herron, who met Sanford for the first time in September, hopes to take master’s level courses in labor relations. She will stay in contact with Sanford monthly on balancing tasks and getting her perspective on issues facing teachers in a time of tightening budgets.
Sanford is one of 12 experienced union leaders who agreed to mentor the scholarship winners.
The others are:
Transport Workers President James Little.
MaryBe McMillan, secretary-treasurer of the North Carolina State AFL-CIO.
RaeLene Brown, secretary-treasurer of the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Central Labor Council in Modesto, Calif.
Davida Russell, president, AFSCME Local 744 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Connie Cordovilla of the AFT Human Rights and Community Relations Department.
David Carpio of the AFL-CIO Political Department.
Mary Finger, retired vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
May Ying Chen, retired vice president of Workers United.
Greg Hamblet, retired vice president of UFCW.
Since 1992, Union Plus has awarded more than $2.8 million in scholarships. This year 13 unionists representing 10 unions received more than $33,000 in scholarships.
*This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO Blog on December 30, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.
About the Author: James Parks had his first encounter with unions at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. He has also been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections. Author photo by Joe Kekeris
With heavy defections from Blue Dog Democrats, the House of Representatives still narrowly passed Wednesday evening 217 to 212 a $154 billion jobs package. It included funds for states to retain front-line workers, aid to the unemployed and transportation projects.
But a jobs bill has yet to be voted on in the Senate, where it’s likely to be viewed more skeptically and reduced in scope in the absence of a major grass-roots campaign. Political activism becomes even more urgent, because a combination of continuing high unemployment and the transitioning of people in and out of jobs could mean that as many as a third of the workforce could be unemployed or undermployed in 2010, according to Lawrence Mishel, director of the Economic Policy Institute.
That’s why a potentially powerful 60-group liberal coalition, Jobs For America Now!, announced earlier Wednesday, becomes especially important. Its leaders are proposing a far more ambitious $400 billion proposal, based in part on plans put forward in the last several weeks by the AFL-CIO and other progressive and civil-rights organizations.
(The full story of the progressive drive for jobs creation can be read here at Truthout.org.)
There’s no doubt that they face an uphill battle to get ambitious jobs legislation through Congress. There was, after all, that close vote yesterday in the House, right-wing propaganda about the failings of the first $787 billion stimulus (it actually saved or created up to 1.6 million jobs), and the spread of an aggressive “deficit hawk” mentality to conservative Democrats.
Even so, Thea Lee, the deputy chief of staff of the AFL-CIO, outlined the themes unifying the organizations: “Across the country, working Americans are calling for urgent action on the jobs crisis, and this action must be on a scale to match the crisis. We must also focus on fundamentally transforming our economy so we never face this type of crisis again — reforming our labor laws, our trade policy, and our financial system to restore needed balance.”
During the debate over the jobs bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared on the House floor, “This legislation brings jobs to Main Street by increasing credit for small businesses, rebuilding the infrastructure of America, and keeping police and fireman and teachers on the job. As we create jobs for Americans, we are doing so in a fiscally responsible way. These investments are fully paid for by redirecting TARP funds from Wall Street to Main Street.”
With every single Republican voting no, she defiantly pointed out how far the American economy had come under the Obama administration even as joblessness is still rampant. “There were 740,000 jobs lost in the first month of this year compared to 11,000 last month. We’re on the road to recovery…We’re creating jobs for Main Street, not just wealth for Wall Street,” she said. “This legislation creates jobs, helps meet the needs of those who are unemployed, and puts us America back on a path to prosperity.”
Action can’t come too soon, and our obstructionist legislators would do well to listen to the plight of the unemployed as powerfully described in James McMurtry’s song, “We Can’t Make It Here.” Even though it was written during the Bush era, it’s all too applicable now:
The groups and leaders featured in the press conference call Wednesday before the vote were almost a Who’s Who of American Liberalism. They included the Campaign for America ’s Future; Anna Burger, the chair of Change to Win;, the veteran organizer Alan Charney of the grass-roots advocacy group,US Action, and the coalition’s interim director; Benjamin Todd Jealous, the NAACP President;and Wider Opportunities for Women. The importance of the coalition goes beyond the specifics of their proposals to their commitment to provide grass-roots muscle in all 50 states to push for jobs legislation in the tough struggle ahead, especially in the Senate. And that’s what’s been missing before on this issue: united activism around jobs which could, potentially, have more diverse grass-roots support in 2010 than health care reform did this year.
The importance of the new coalition was underscored by an aide to Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill), who co-chairs the bipartisan Jobs Now! Congerssional caucus. The aide told Truthout: “These are the A-List groups. If that coalition steps up to the plate, they’ll bring plenty of resource capacity: polling, lobbying, putting pressure on the usual suspects.” Right now, though, the staffer observed, “Clearly everyone’s focused on pushing health care across the finish line, and that’s not even done. After that, everyone will be talking about jobs, jobs, jobs — at least until November.”
So, despite the narrow vote on Wednesday, there’s some realistic hope that a combination of continuing unemployment, grass-roots organizing and political necessity could push through meaningful jobs legislation — and the Pelosi-backed bill is considered a very good start.
After Wednesday’s vote, union leader Anna Burger declared:
Our jobs crisis cannot be solved by one bill alone. But today the House demonstrated the bold and swift leadership the American people demand. It’s time to provide relief to the millions of workers who get up each morning and scour the help wanted ads in the hopes of finding a good job that can support a family. Congress today made an essential first step to invest in programs to immediately put people back to work…
But our work is far from over. Our leaders must continue to work non-stop to pass a comprehensive jobs agenda that puts millions of Americans back to work today and makes strategic investments to create the jobs that Americans will need in the future.
The biggest differences between the House-passed measure and the progressive-backed proposals are the sheer amount of spending and the absence in the current House bill of public sector job creation targeting hard-hit communities. As described by the coalition, this jobs-creation provision — which could create one million new jobs with $40 billion in federal funding, according to Rep. Keith Ellison (D–Minn.) — is a vital one. The group’s call to action describes its importance:
We can directly create jobs that put people to work helping communities meet pressing needs, including in distressed communities facing severe unemployment. These initiatives must be designed so they maintain existing wage and benefit standards and do not displace existing jobs or simply exchange one group of unemployed workers for another.
The urgent call to action is often at odds, though, with the pragmatic, even cynical, calculations of conservaDems who are worried that big deficit spending could be a potent Republican issue in their home states that trumps joblessness.
Compare the different perspectives. First, here’s what’s at stake for American workers, as described by the Jobs Now! coalition:
An Urgent Call for Action to Stem the U.S. Jobs Crisis
The U.S. unemployment rate exceeded 10% in October for the first time in a quarter century. Over 15 million Americans are able and willing to work but cannot find a job. More than one out of every three unemployed workers has been out of a job for more than six months. The situation facing African American and Latino workers is even bleaker, with unemployment at 15.6% and 12.7%, respectively.
These grim statistics don’t capture the full extent of the hardship. There are another 9 million people working part time because they cannot find full-time work. Millions of others have given up looking for a job, and so aren’t counted in the official unemployment figures. Altogether, over 17% of the labor force is underemployed–more than 26 million Americans–including one in four minority workers. Last, given individuals moving in and out of jobs, we can expect a third of the workforce, and 40% of workers of color, to be unemployed or underemployed at some point over the next year. (emphasis added.)
Despite an effective and bold recovery package we are still facing a prolonged period of high unemployment. Two years from now, absent further action, we are likely to have unemployment at 8% or more, a higher rate than that attained even at the worst point of the last two downturns.
Joblessness on this scale creates enormous social and economic problems–and denies millions of families the ability to meet even their most basic needs. .
Then take a look at the political machinations among Democrats who feel themselves to be vulnerable politically, along with some retiring members who feel they can vote their conscience on behalf of a jobs package. Here’s how The Hill reported their current thinking:
The close votes reflect the growing unease among centrist Democrats that the deficit spending that Congress has undertaken to right the economy is becoming a potent campaign issue.
“We’ve got to indicate we’re serious about the deficit,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who voted “no” and represents a Republican-leaning district with low unemployment. “We didn’t cause the deficit, but we have to address it.”
Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), who is retiring from Congress, changed his vote to put Democrats over the top. That signals a potent variable in vote counting next year — retirees who no longer need to respond to traditional political pressures…
Political analysts are closely watching for more centrist retirements. Those members will have no fear of losing committee assignments and can’t be won over with promises of campaign help or other inducements…
But Democrats facing tough re-election fights found themselves trying to determine if voters are angrier about 10 percent unemployment or trillions in deficits.
“My staff is looking at it,” said a newly elected Democratic member from a conservative district as the clock ticked down. “If I can’t make a good case that a lot of money is coming back to my district, I can’t support it. I wish we had more time.”
He voted “no.”
Compare that political calculation with the fear and anxiety gripping America’s unemployed, with half of them reporting depression, panic and heavy borrowing from friends. The New York Times reported this week:
Poll Reveals Trauma of Joblessness in U.S.
More than half of the nation’s unemployed workers have borrowed money from friends or relatives since losing their jobs. An equal number have cut back on doctor visits or medical treatments because they are out of work.
Almost half have suffered from depression or anxiety. About 4 in 10 parents have noticed behavioral changes in their children that they attribute to their difficulties in finding work.
It doesn’t seem that many members of Congress fully understand yet the havoc that’s been let loose in the land because of widespread unemployment. Meanwhile, posturing over ideology continues. They all might benefit if they could listen with open hearts to the plight of those without work in their districts and states, as aptly depicted in the song, “We Can’t Make It Here,” written by James McMurty during the Bush era, even before the meltdown, and unfortunately, it still applies today.
Who is listening to them now?
*This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post on December 17, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.
About the Author Art Levine is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, and a former Fellow with the Progressive Policy Insititute. He has also written for Mother Jones, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon and numerous other publications. He is the author of 2005’s PPI report, Parity-Plus: A Third Way Approach to Fix America’s Mental Health System, and is currently researching a book on mental health issues. Levine also posts commentary at Art Levine Confidential
As newly elected secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, I traveled the country this fall, talking with workers and hearing their concerns. The economic crisis is causing a lot of pain. So many people have no jobs, no health care–and many are losing their homes. And as I looked into the faces of young workers, the reality hit home that these young people are part of the first generation in recent history likely to be worse off than their parents.
This is a tragedy.
The AFL-CIO and our community affiliate, Working America, recently surveyed young workers–and I’m not talking about 17- and 18-year-olds. I’m talking about 18- to 34-year-olds. In the past 10 years, young workers have suffered disproportionately from the downturn in the economy:
One in three young workers is worried about being able to find a job–let alone a full-time job with benefits.
Only 31 percent make enough money to cover their bills and put some aside–that is 22 percentage points worse than it was 10 years ago.
Nearly half worry about having more debt than they can handle.
One in three still lives at home with parents.
Young workers are living the effects of a 30-year campaign to create a low-wage workforce. It has succeeded.
For decades, the far right led an anti-government, anti-investment, feed-the-rich-and-starve-the-poor drive that gave us an era of deregulation, privatization and job exporting.
At the same time, corporations and government attacked unions and workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for decent wages and benefits. When unions are strong, paychecks grow and workers have benefits like health care and pensions.
When unions are under attack, paychecks shrink. Pensions vanish. Health care becomes the emergency room.
What’s left is not working for young people–or for any of us. It will take a broadly shared sense of wartime urgency to replace today’s low-wage economy with a high-wage, high-skills economy. The first step must be immediate action to address the nation’s jobs crisis, with five essential steps:
Extend the lifeline for jobless workers.
Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems and invest in green technology and green jobs.
Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services.
Fund jobs in our communities.
Put TARP funds to work for Main Street with job-creating loans to small businesses.
We took these initiatives to the White House Summit on Jobs on Dec. 3 and are pushing Congress to take action now. The first reports from the Jobs Summit are encouraging, and we look forward to working with the Obama administration and Congress to carry on this momentum.
It’s time to rebuild an economy that works–an economy based on prosperity, an economy we can be proud to pass on to our children and their children. And we need young people to lead the way. That survey I mentioned earlier shows they are ready.
· Young workers have a whole new level of civic engagement, with the surge of new voters in the 2008 election.
· They are well-informed and following government and policy news.
· They believe in collective action and understand the power of having a union.
· They have hope for the future and the vision of a savvy, diverse movement to bring about progressive change.
We’re planning a major summit for young workers after the first of the year to bring all our ideas and voices together. When crises hit, it’s young people who drive change.
Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 when he led the Montgomery bus boycott. At 25, César Chávez was registering Mexican Americans to vote. Walter Reuther headed strikes demanding GM recognize its workers’ rights starting when he was 30. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was 33 when she drafted the declaration of women’s rights.
Young people are being hard in this jobs crisis. But I believe they provide much of the fuel we need to get out of it.
*This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post on December 7, 2009. Reprinted with permission by the author.
About the Author: Liz Shuler was elected AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer in September 2009, the youngest person ever to become an officer of the AFL-CIO. Shuler previously was the highest-ranking women in the Electrical Workers (IBEW) union, serving as the top assistant to the IBEW president since 2004. In 1993, she joined IBEW Local 125 in Portland, Ore., where she worked as an organizer and state legislative and political director. In
1998, she was part of the IBEW’s international staff in Washington, D.C., as a legislative and political representative.
Each day while Congress was on its two-week spring break, some 30,000 long-term jobless workers ran out of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits because of Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), who blocked a vote to extend UI benefits.
Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka at the Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School
With 
Recent polls show a majority of Americans want Congress to pass comprehensive 
Meanwhile, a study by Health Care for America Now (
With heavy defections from Blue Dog Democrats, the House of Representatives still narrowly passed Wednesday evening 217 to 212 a $154 billion 
