The Republicans campaigned heavily on job creation last fall, but to no one’s surprise they are focusing on repealing health care and limiting abortion. Let’s remind them that jobs are still the priority and millions are still unemployed. Also, some news about what’s happening on the state level in Connecticut and Ohio are below.
21st Century Full Employment & Training Act
Last year Rep. Conyers, D-Mich., introduced legislation with the goal of bringing the national unemployment rate down to 4 percent. He plans on re-introducing this deficit-neutral bill again in this Congress. Please encourage your representative to co-sponsor this legislation.
Another bill, to be introduced soon by Rep. Berkely, D-Nev., will extend unemployment benefits – including for the 99ers (unemployed workers who have exhausted all their benefits). We will give you updates (including the bill numbers) as this information becomes available.
Connecticut
In New Haven, Conn., the newly-formed Jobs and Unemployed Committee of the New Haven Peoples Center will hold a press conference Friday, Feb 3, at the state job center (unemployment office). The press conference will use the U.S. Dept. of Labor’s employment report, issued the first Friday of every month, to highlight the wave of 99-ers and the effect this is having on families, communities, and state and local government budgets. A petition calling for extending benefits and immediate action to create jobs will be presented to a Congressional representative.
Ohio
Labor and allies in Ohio including the NAACP, MoveOn and many community groups have formed the Good Jobs, Strong Communities coalition to mobilize opposition to proposals by the new Republican Governor John Kasich for drastic cuts in services, privatization, massive layoffs and crippling of public employee union rights.
The coalition plans to hold three statewide actions before July 1, the date by which the Republican-controlled State Legislature must adopt a new biennial budget. The first is set for March 15, the date by which Kasich must submit his budget proposal, and will involve demonstrations in cities throughout the state.
Kasich, a former managing director of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street bank, whose collapse brought on the world economic crisis, believes that corporate policies should control state government. He seeks to use a projected $8-10 billion deficit as justification to carry out his anti-labor, anti-people program. One Ohio Now, another labor-community coalition, has shown that the deficit can be closed without cuts and layoffs by closing tax loopholes, restoring previous taxes on profit-swollen corporations and reforming the state income tax in favor of working people.
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Scott Marshall is a vice chair of the Communist Party and chair of its Labor Commission. Scott grew up in Virginia where he first became active in the civil rights movement in high school, working on voter registration and anti-Klan projects in rural Southern Virginia and Tennessee. He was also active against the war in Vietnam.
Scott has been a life long trade unionist and was active in rank and file reform movements in the Teamsters, Machinists and Steelworkers unions in the 1970s and '80s. He was co-chair of the Save Our Jobs committee of USWA local 1834 at Pullman Standard in Chicago and active in nationwide organizing against plant shutdowns and layoffs. He was a founder of the unemployed organization Jobs or Income Now (Join), in Chicago, and the National Congress of Unemployed Organizations in the 1980s.
Scott has worked for the Communist Party since 1987 when he became the district organizer for the party in Illinois, a post he held until he was elected chair of the National Labor Commission in 1997. Scott remains active in SOAR (Steelworkers Active Organized Retirees). He lives in Chicago.
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