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.
Support The Troops. Support The Troops. Support The Troops.
This is the newest “wallpaper” in the United States. You see it on bumper stickers, in commercials and hear it in conversations. Based on the number of times you see or hear the phrase, it’s hard to imagine that we could do anything more to show the troops that we’re behind them.
Think again.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly one-in-five veterans age 20 to 24 are unemployed. This is THREE times the national average. According to the government, approximately a quarter million veterans leave the military annually. So we’re talking about many thousands of soldiers who served their country and have returned to an unemployment line.
These unemployed former soldiers list a variety of reasons for the high unemployment rate, according to a poll by CareerBuilder—the lack of available jobs where they live, employers not understanding how the skills acquired in the military translate to the civilian world, the lack of a college degree and the inability of the soldiers themselves to adequately show what they learned in the military in interviews and resumes. Sure these veterans could probably do a better job of presenting themselves and their experience in the employment dance, but I believe that based on their sacrifice, it is incumbent for corporations to meet them more than half way.
A disclaimer: I have never served in the military. And it doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines of my writing to see that I, like the majority of Americans, believe that enough people have died in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s time for us to get the heck out of there.
As much as I may disagree with our government’s staying in a place where we’re not wanted, I do think that our soldiers have tackled a really tough assignment and the vast majority have represented their uniform and country well. I’m not sure that I’d advocate that returning vets should get special treatment, but for the youngest of the returning soldiers to have three times the unemployment rate of non-vets is embarrassing. And wrong.
But it gets worse. According to the survey by CareerBuilder, eleven percent of veterans don’t identify themselves as veterans on their resume. While another seventeen percent do so selectively. Support the troops, NOT.
People who put themselves in harms way should be appreciated for their loyalty and sacrifice. To not appreciate their ability to work as part of a team, their disciplined approach to work, their problem solving skills, the ability to work under pressure, respect, integrity and leadership is overlooking the skills and talents that they’ve already proven on the battlefield. It’s time that employers looked beyond the limitations—the lack of a college degree, etc.—and to appreciate what these potentially talented and dedicated job candidates will bring to a corporation.
Support the troops by hiring them, it’s the least that we can all do.
About the Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. For free job and work advice, check out the award-winning workplace911.com. Check the revised edition of his Wall Street Journal best seller, “The Boss’s Survival Guide.” If you have a question for Bob, contact him via bob@workplace911.com.
Marking the first anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the SEIU is releasing a new report today analyzing the social and economic impact of the Recovery Act. This report explains what the aggregate numbers on economic growth and job creation fail to illustrate–how the Recovery Act helped counter the recession by protecting human services and the workers employed to deliver those services at a local level.
Reporting by state recipients of Recovery Act direct government investment spending demonstrates that this spending has saved or created 1,239,437 jobs in both the public and private sector. When you include the impact of indirect spending–jobs created or saved as a result of the consumer spending of directly funded job holders–the total rises to 1,859,156 jobs that have been saved or created. Pretty amazing. Without it, the unemployment rate in December 2009 may have reached 11.2 percent, 1.2 percent higher than the actual rate of 10.0 percent that month.
How Recovery Act Investments in Human Services Created and Saved Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs -
While it would be impossible to describe all of the significant findings of this report in just one blog post, I’ll be doing just that in a series of blog posts at SEIU.orgover the next couple of days. I’ll also be highlighting the stories included in this report–collected from a combination of public sources, government Web sites, and interviews with SEIU state-level leaders–which uniquely illustrate how states and some local units of government have used ARRA resources to limit scaling back.
For workers like Akbar Chatman–a substance abuse counselor for the Department of Mental Health in Los Angeles County–the Recovery Act played a critical role in helping him do his job. Watch:
While conditions are far better than they would have been without the stimulus fund actions that were taken, it is clear that substantial challenges remain. Without additional fiscal relief, new budget gaps could force state governments to shed 900,000 jobs this year.
*This post originally appeared in SEIU Blog on February 17, 2010. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Kate Thomas is a blogger, web producer and new media coordinator at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a labor union with 2.1 million members in the healthcare, public and property service sectors. Kate’s passions include the progressive movement, the many wonders of the Internet and her job working for an organization that is helping to improve the lives of workers and fight for meaningful health care and labor law reform. Prior to working at SEIU, Katie worked for the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) as a communications/public relations coordinator and editor of AMSA’s newsletter appearing in The New Physician magazine.
*The following post originally appeared in Winning Workplaces on February 9, 2010 in support of our proposed Workplace Bill of Rights. Thanks to Mark and Winning Workplaces for their support!
The U.S. has survived and, most often during its 234-year history, thrived under a forward-thinking Bill of Rights. Much more recently, innovative airline JetBlue has turned its industry on its ear and even inspired action by the White House through its Customer Bill of Rights – which, from a consumer’s point of view, is one of the few bright spots amidst a slew of disappointing developments like this one.
If the Bill of Rights concept works, why not apply it to the workplace culture? After all, research shows that more highly engaged employees result in stronger company earnings, and lead those firms to more resiliency in down economies like the one we’re in now.
That – along with fair treatment of, and an adequate living wage for, employees – is the idea behind Workplace Fairness’ proposed Workplace Bill of Rights. The 9 “basic rights [they] believe every worker should be entitled to” that they spell out here are the basis of a petition in partnership with Change.org. The signatures gathered will be presented to the Obama Administration, through which a best-case scenario would produce widespread adoption of the bill by employers.
The largest hurdle before this initiative is, of course, business owners’ uncertainty of the payoff of employee engagement, or of anything beyond what they’re already doing in a tough economy. This is especially true of small businesses, which comprise the vast majority of employers and tend to be under-resourced versus their larger peers.
To help prove the point of my title for this post, and hopefully help overcome this hurdle, I’ve linked some of the 9 basic employee rights* Workplace Fairness is advocating to bottom line business results that Winning Workplaces has seen in our small business award honorees, and confirmed in workplace research by others – both of which I’ve blogged about previously:
• Employees should be treated with honesty and respect – Among our 2010 small business award applicants, employee activities designed to foster greater respect helped them grow 2009 revenues 12% over 2008, on average.
• Working full-time should guarantee a basic standard of living – Paying only 5% over the minimum wage saves a business almost $2,200 per employee in turnover costs.
• No working person should be without health insurance – An average increase in employer-paid employee medical premiums of 6.8% of our 2009 small business award finalists, over their 2008 counterparts, led to increases in employee tenure and year-over-year revenue growth, and a decrease in turnover.
• Employees should be able to leave a job with dignity – Our 2008 award winners’ universal adoption of retirement plans that match employee contributions at an average rate of 2.8% is linked to double-digit, year-over-year revenue growth and average per-employee revenue of over $200,000.
• There is more to life than work – We pointed to Talent Management’s citation of a Corporate Executive Board analysis which shows that strategies to promote work/life balance can raise workplace productivity by 21% and employee tenure by 33%.
The net impact of these business outcomes is stronger sales from a larger, more satisfied customer base, which adds up to job growth and ultimately a more robust economy over time.
If you see benefits for both employees and companies in WF’s Workplace Bill of Rights, you can help to advance it by signing their petition here (and voting /commenting at Change.org)
*Update: Workplace Fairness Executive Director Paula Brantner informed me that even though their list was promoted as having 9 employee rights, there are actually 10. See toward the bottom of their petition, as well as the voting/comments page over at Change.org.
About the Author: Mark Harbekeensures that content on Winning Workplaces’ website is up-to-date, accurate and engaging. He also writes and edits their monthly e-newsletter, Ideas, and provides graphic design and marketing support. His experience includes serving as editorial assistant for Meredith Corporation’s Midwest Living magazine title, publications editor for Visionation, Ltd., and proofreader for the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. Mark holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Drake University. Winning Workplaces is a not-for-profit providing consulting, training and information to help small and midsize organizations create great workplaces. Too often, the information and resources needed to create a high-performance workplace are out of reach for all but the largest organizations. Winning Workplaces is changing that by offering employers affordable consulting, training and information.
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.
A new report shows that comprehensive immigration reform would help American workers and the U.S. economy. Reform that offers a path to citizenship for currently unauthorized workers and enforces workers’ rights would raise the “wage floor” for the entire U.S. economy and increase the total gross domestic product (GDP) by at least $1.5 trillion over the next decade, the report says.
The temporary worker program only generates an annual increase of 0.44 percent in the nation’s GDP or $792 billion over 10 years. It also leads to declining wages for newly legalized immigrant workers, the report says.
Mass deportation would reduce U.S. GDP by 1.46 percent annually or $2.6 trillion, not including the actual cost of deportation, the report adds. Wages would rise for less-skilled native-born workers, while wages for higher-skilled natives would drop. The deportations would lead to widespread job loss as well.
History bears out these findings, according to the report. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which provided opportunities for citizenship, was enacted during an economic recession characterized by high unemployment. Yet it helped raise wages and spurred increases in educational, home and small-business investments by newly legalized immigrants.
Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, director of the North American Integration and Development Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the report’s author, says:
This is a compelling economic reason to move away from the current “vicious cycle” where enforcement-only policies perpetuate unauthorized migration and exert downward pressure on already low wages, and toward a “virtuous cycle” of worker empowerment in which legal status and labor rights exert upward pressure on wages.
*This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on January 11, 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
Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis today announced nearly $100 million in green jobs training grants, as authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act). The grants will support job training programs to help dislocated workers and others, including veterans, women, African Americans and Latinos, find jobs in expanding green industries and related occupations. Approximately $28 million of the total funds will support projects in communities impacted by auto industry restructuring.
Through the Energy Training Partnership Grants being administered by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration, 25 projects ranging from approximately $1.4 to $5 million each will receive grants. These grants are built on strategic partnerships — requiring labor and business to work together.
The grants announced today are part of a $500 million program created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — a.k.a. “the stimulus.”
UPDATE (Jan. 7): It’s not really clear from the list of grantees that DOL posted on their site, so I want to point out that training programs led by CtW-affiliated unions are prominent among those that received grants yesterday. For example, New York’s Shortman Fund (which was awarded a $2.8 million grant) is operated by SEIU 32BJ; SEIU locals also participate in H-CAP Inc. (granted $4.6 million); and LIUNA is active in training programs in Virginia, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Montana that were collectively awarded almost $17 million.
UPDATE (Jan. 7, 3:00PM): Quotes!
Mike Fishman, President of SEIU 32BJ:
High-impact, cost-effective labor-management programs like [the Shortman Fund’s] Green Supers are vital to the success of President Obama’s energy and environmental protection agenda. With nearly 80 percent of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions produced by buildings it’s imperative for owners, workers, environmental groups and the Federal government to jointly tackle this environmental challenge.
Terry O’Sullivan, General President, LIUNA:
Weatherization on a nationwide scale will require hundreds of thousands of skilled workers and LIUNA’s weatherization training program is leading the way while creating good jobs for working families and their communities. LIUNA’s credentialed weatherization workers will set the standard for a new American industry.
*This post originally appeared in Change to Win on January 6, 2010. Reprinted with permission from the author.
About the Author Jason Lefkowitz: is the Online Campaigns Organizer for Change to Win, a partnership of seven unions and six million workers united together to restore the American Dream for everybody. He built his first Web site in 1995 and has been building online communities professionally since 1998. To read more of his work, visit the Change to Win blog, CtW Connect, at http://www.changetowin.org/connect.
This morning, President Obama announced he will invite labor leaders, business executives, small business owners, economists and other financial experts to a special White House summit on jobs next month.
Obama says the summit will explore ways to slow the loss of jobs and quicken the pace of job creation at a time when the nation’s jobless rate is at 10.2 percent, its highest point since 1983. As Obama said,
We have an obligation to consider every additional responsible step that we can to encourage and accelerate job creation in this country.
Just this week, the AFL-CIO Executive Council met in Washington, D.C., to outline a national jobs creation strategy that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will announce Tuesday at a special Economic Policy Institute (EPI) jobs and economy panel and seminar. (Plan now to view the live webcast from 9-11:30 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 17, at www.aflcio.org/createjobs.)
The summit announcement came as a new report showed there were 502,000 initial claims for unemployment benefits last week. Dire as that is, it’s lower than expected and is the smallest number of first-time claims since January. But, according to Obama:
Even though we’ve slowed the loss of jobs—and today’s report on the continued decline in unemployment claims is a hopeful sign—the economic growth that we’ve seen has not yet led to the job growth that we desperately need.
EPI President Lawrence Mishel calls the announcement of the White House jobs summit “necessary and welcome.”
President Obama is right to say that we should take “every responsible step” to help put Americans back to work. With a double-digit unemployment rate and nearly 16 million Americans looking for work, we should take decisive action as quickly as possible to create jobs. High rates of unemployment damage our economy in ways that can take years, if not generations, to fix, by casting millions of families and children into poverty and making it difficult for our nation to invest for the future. President Obama’s focus on job creation is necessary and welcome.
Currently 15.7 million workers are jobless and when the unemployment and underemployment rates are combined they soar to 17.5 percent—more than 27 million workers.
A date for the summit will be announced soon.
This article originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on November 12, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.
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.
Today is World Day for Decent Work, and union members in more than 100 countries are mobilizing to address the global economic and employment crisis and demand fundamental reform of the world economy.
The deepest global recession since the 1930s has led to a jobs crisis with millions of people out of work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) predicts that as many as 50 million more workers could be kicked out of jobs worldwide in the next year and could lead to a dramatic increase in the number of working poor.
Live online coverage of the activities around the world, including videos, photographs and messages from events in every continent, will be broadcast on a special website, www.wddw.org, which will be updated via a 24-hour live feed.
At its recent convention, the AFL-CIO strongly underscored its support for decent work for workers in the United States and around the world by unanimously passing a major resolution, “A Labor Movement Agenda for a Stronger, Cleaner and More Just Global Economy.” The resolution stressed the need for the global labor movement to promote the ILO’s Global Jobs Pact to help coordinate government efforts to respond to the employment crisis.
Following the convention, the newly elected AFL-CIO leadership traveled to meet with working families around the country, leading up to the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. At the G-20, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) General Secretary Guy Ryder, along with other international trade union leaders, met with President Obama. They stressed the elements of the June 2009 ILO “Jobs Pact” and the importance of enacting coordinated policies to create decent and environmentally sustainable work to combat growing unemployment, enact comprehensive and effective regulation of financial markets and promote the inclusion of key international labor standards in all assistance programs of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
The economic crisis is far from over and the global stimulus packages will not be enough to keep joblessness from growing at a steady pace, according to a new report by the ITUC. The report, “Jobs—The Path to Recovery,” was released to mark World Day for Decent Work. It shows that only 1.8 percent of financial rescue efforts have been dedicated directly to employment.
The report highlights trade union actions to fight the crisis around the world and explains the steps needed to achieve a decent work-led recovery and build a fairer and more sustainable world economy for future generations.
The G-20 summit, which ended recently in Pittsburgh, made progress in some areas but failed to completely address the overwhelming need to create new jobs now. “The current situation needs mending,” says Ryder:
Trade unions are raising their voices across the continents, to keep up the pressure for fundamental change, for justice and equity.
They face tremendous resistance from those who have profited from the exploitation of others in the past. Trade unions are determined to confront and defeat that resistance, and to ensure that governments everywhere get the message that they must deliver the results that working people demand.
Click here to read the full report, “The Path to Recovery: How Employment is Central to Ending the Global Crisis.”
Nowhere is the need for decent work more obvious than in the sweatshops of Asia, where workers toil long hours for little pay and few, if any, benefits to make apparel and other items for export that they could never afford to buy themselves.
Today, in New Delhi, India, and in cities in the United States, United Kingdom and throughout Europe, workers will launch a campaign for a living wage called the Asia Floor Wage.
In rallies, workshops, meetings with government and business leaders, public lectures by prominent human rights supporters and press conferences, they will promote a new strategy for global economic growth based on protecting workers’ rights and guaranteeing a living wage.
With so many of the world’s garments and other products being manufactured in Asia, corporations have exploited the workers there, forcing them to work long hours with little pay and few benefits. The campaign challenges this race-to-the-bottom by calling for raising the minimum wage in all major garment producing countries.
In the United States, Jobs with Justice is teaming up with the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), the Asia Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) and the AFL-CIO for an educational campaign with our members and allies.
To learn more about the Asia Floor Wage campaign, click here.
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.
This article originally appeared in the AFL-CIO blog on October 7, 2009. Re-printed with permission by the author.
Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka at the Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School
Support The Troops. Support The Troops. Support The Troops.
Marking the first anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the SEIU is releasing a new report today analyzing the social and economic impact of the Recovery Act. This report explains what the aggregate numbers on economic growth and job creation fail to illustrate–how the Recovery Act helped counter the recession by protecting human services and the workers employed to deliver those services at a local level.
*The following post originally appeared in 
That – along with fair treatment of, and an adequate living wage for, employees – is the idea behind Workplace Fairness’ proposed Workplace Bill of Rights. The 9 “basic rights [they] believe every worker should be entitled to” that they 
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Just this week, the AFL-CIO Executive Council met in Washington, D.C., to outline a national jobs creation strategy that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will announce Tuesday at a special Economic Policy Institute (EPI) jobs and economy panel and seminar. (Plan now to view the live webcast from 9-11:30 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 
