Labor & Employment Law

Trumka: Washington Lacks Political Courage to Fix Nation?s Jobs Crisis

By Mike Hall

Today’s economic crisis and the decline of the nation’s middle class “cries out for political courage,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a major address on the economy and jobs crisis at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this afternoon. But that courage, he said,

is not much in evidence….Too many people in Washington seem to think that now that we have bailed out the banks, everything will be okay.

Pointing to the conversations he has had with workers?employed and jobless, union and nonunion, young and old?on his recent jobs-focused swing through California, Trumka told the nation’s leading journalists:

Everywhere I went, people asked me, why do so many of the people we elect seem to care only about Wall Street? Why is helping banks a matter of urgency, but unemployment is something we just have to live with? Why don’t we make anything in America anymore? And why is it so hard to pass a health care bill that guarantees Americans healthy lives instead of guaranteeing insurance companies healthy profits?

He said it is time to remake and build a new economy and reverse the fundamental changes in the nation’s economic structure and rules that for the past decade-plus “have celebrated private greed over public service.”

These include rules that boosted corporate empowerment; trade polices that encouraged shipping U.S. jobs overseas; financial deregulation that promoted speculation; and the systematic dismantling of the nation’s pension and health care systems.

These policies culminated in the worst economic decade in living memory?we suffered a net loss of jobs, the housing market collapsed, real wages fell and more children fell into poverty….This is not a portrait of a cyclical recession, but of a nation with profound, unaddressed structural economic problems on a long-term, downward slide.

Calling for an “entirely different kind of economy,” Trumka said the core of that new economy must include the creation of millions of new jobs, the restoration of the freedom of workers to form unions, genuine health care reform and re-regulation of the financial system.

The AFL-CIO’s five-point program would immediately address the jobs crisis by creating some 4 million jobs, Trumka said. In addition, more long-term initiatives are needed to build a lasting and job-filled recovery?yet too many lawmakers and policymakers are urging a “go slow” approach and displaying an unwillingness to spend the money needed to fix the foundation of the economy?job creation.

These voices are harming millions of unemployed Americans and their families?but they are also 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 double-digit unemployment.

The nation’s middle class can’t prosper in a global economy, said Trumka, without a healthy manufacturing sector. Rebuilding manufacturing and the jobs that go with it requires

a combination of fair trade and currency policies, worker training, infrastructure investment and regional development policies targeted to help economically distressed areas.

He also called for new rules that ensure safe, healthy and family-friendly workplaces and comprehensive immigration reform. Employers must renew their shared responsibility with their workers’ retirement security and strengthening Social Security.

On health care, Trumka slammed the Senate bill’s tax on the middle class with its tax on workers’ health care benefits that would hit some 31 million workers. While the Senate bill “rightly seeks to ensure that most Americans have health insurance,

the tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families. This is a policy designed to benefit elites?in this case, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at the expense of the broader public.

It’s the same tragic pattern that got us where we are today, and I can assure you the labor movement is fighting with everything we’ve got to win health care reform that is worthy of the support of working men and women.

Trumka also issued a warning to lawmakers who may try to hide behind insufficient and token gestures to create jobs, fix the economy and protect the middle class while continuing to give the privileged and Wall Street a free ride.

The reality is that when unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people will not stand for tokenism. We will not vote for politicians who think they can push a few crumbs our way and then continue the failed economic policies of the last 30 years….There is no middle ground. We are in a “show me” kind of mood, and time is running out.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 11, 2010 (boomark / email).