Labor & Employment Law

UAW, Rainbow PUSH Launch Campaign for Jobs, Justice and Peace

By James Parks

The UAW is joining with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in a new campaign to refocus our national priorities on jobs, justice and peace. 

During a press conference today in Detroit, UAW President Bob King and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of Rainbow PUSH, said the campaign will call on our national leaders to rebuild America through new industrial and trade policies that create jobs, encourage manufacturing in America and put workers first.

?The number one focus of our national leaders should be putting Americans back to work,? King said.

No group has suffered more from America?s economic meltdown than working men and women. We need industrial and trade policies that work to keep jobs and manufacturing in the U.S.

The campaign will begin with a march in Detroit on Aug. 28 to commemorate the ?Freedom Walk,? when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march by 125,000 people through the streets of Motown in the summer of 1963. It was during this march that Dr. King first delivered his famous ?I Have a Dream? speech, just a couple of months prior to the historic March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. 

Bob King and Jackson said their campaign also will push for enforcement of workers? rights and civil rights laws, industrial regulation and fair and just education, economic and health policies. It will seek an end to the ongoing wars in the Middle East so the money in the war budget can be redirected to rebuilding America, they said. King added: 

George [W.] Bush came into office with a $127 billion surplus. He proceeded to give billions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest Americans and wasted trillions of dollars on useless wars while funding for schools and other basic services was gutted. Bush and the Republicans left the American public with a trillion dollar deficit, a crumbling infrastructure, and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Additionally, the campaign will focus on home foreclosures and will call for a moratorium on the practice that forces hardworking Americans from their homes while at the same time bailing out Wall Street executives and paying them million-dollar bonuses.

?Our cities are in financial crisis and teachers, transportation workers and all who do the hands-on work that make our cities run are the first to feel the effects of budget cuts,? Jackson said.

In Appalachia and the Gulf, years of unenforced regulation driven by corporate greed and government complicity have led to needless deaths and destruction in the coal and oil fields. Our national infrastructure is crumbling while millions of talented workers stand by,  ready to stem the tide.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on July 12, 2010 (boomark / email).