St. Louis, Midwest Labor Commission Meeting, 21-22 June 2008

(Opening questions for the group) Right now:
How many of you cringe when you pull into the gas station?
How many feel the pinch in your wallets at the grocery store?
How many of you worry about job and income stability?
How many of you know someone or are yourself facing foreclosure?
How many of you are already cutting back on spending on anything extra, including second-guessing vacation plans?
How many of you wonder how bad its going to get?

Everyone in this room knows were in bad shape, and its not getting better. Every month this year has brought worse news on unemployment numbers, May brought a 0.5% increase to bring the total to 5.5%, an increase that was the largest since the mid-1980s, and the highest rate since late 2004. Over the past six months private-sector employment has fallen by 411,000; the long-term unemployed share is up to 18.3%; the underemployment rate is at 9.7%; all of which add up to the fact that almost 10% of the workforce is unemployed or underemployed.

Michigan has consistently led the nation in unemployment in recent months, and theirs stands at 8.5% for May, the highest since the 1992 recession. Michigan has lost nearly 94,000 jobs so far this year, and June will complete the states eighth consecutive year of payroll job loss. This is the longest stretch of job loss in Michigan history since the 1929 stock market crash plunged the nation into depression.

Even higher, and reaching records this summer, is youth unemployment. Its expected to hit 66% for youth nationwide, and the numbers rise dramatically for African American youth, who in Chicago face an unemployment rate of 85%. Crime and murder rates continue to increase, hmm, I wonder why that could be?

The power of a paycheck is also dropping; hourly earnings were up 3.5% over the past year, at the slowest rate of growth for over 2 years. And since inflation is running at around 4%, this means continued losses in the buying power for most workers. When you consider just the increase in the price of a gallon of gas, you can see how much working class Americans are suffering right now.

Last week I came across some data that truly turned my stomach, but helped explain some of the misguided priorities in this country. The ratio of the wage income of the top 1% of earners to that of the bottom 90% more than doubled between 1979 and 2006, increasing from a ratio of 9.4-to-1 to 19.9-to-1. In contrast, there was relatively little change in the earnings disparity from 1947 to 1979, when wages at all levels of the economy grew apace. Even worse is this one: in 2004 the upper one-tenth of 1% earned 70.4 times as much as the average person in the bottom 90% of the income scale. In 1979, that ratio was only 21-to-1. Most simply put, in 1979 it took the highest-paid earners 12.4 days to make what most other earners did in a year, but by 2004 that was accomplished in a mere 3.7 days.

Those are the Wall Street guys, the hedge fund managers, the ones trying to convince us all that at first we werent in a recession, then maybe we were, and now its going to be over fast. Theyre the ones that really only feel the recession on paper, their daily lives only affected if they get caught doing something they shouldnt. Theyre also the guys currently in the White House and all their cronies. Recession or not, we know how much its really hurting the vast majority of people in this country.

Economic Stimulus
The republicans decided that the best way to fix all this was to send us all checks. Or many of us, though not all.

So I have a few more questions for you all:
How many of you have received a check?
How many of you used it to pay bills?
How many didnt spend it, but put it in savings?
How many of you took it to the mall like you were supposed to?
How many of you donated some or all of it to a worthy cause like the PWW?

Back in January when the stimulus plan was introduced, the AFL-CIO presented their own recommendations for a short-term plan that would help working families more than Big Business. It included the following five points:
1. Extension of unemployment benefits (which as of last week was passed by the House as part of the war funding bill though still not totally out of danger)
2. Increased food stamp benefits (I believe this was either vetoed or still sitting stuck somewhere)
3. Tax rebates targeted to middle-income and lower-income taxpayers
4. Fiscal relief for state and local governments to avoid the economically depressing effect of tax increases and budget cuts (didnt happen, and now states are being forced to cut programs for public health, elderly and disabled, all levels of education, state and local workforces, and so on)
5. Acceleration of ready-to-go public investment in school renovations and bridge repair.
#s 4 and 5 are closely related in that funding for one provides some relief for the other.

Public Works
Which brings us to the main point: we need a new WPA. Heres a little history for those who arent too familiar and a refresher for others. The Works Progress Administration was the largest New Deal agency, employing millions of people and affecting most every locality, especially rural and western mountain populations. It was created in April 1935 by FDRs presidential order, and activated with congressional funding in July of that year (note that the U.S. Congress funded it annually but did not set it up). It provided jobs and income to the unemployed during the Great Depression, and up until 1943, when shut down by Congress. The program built many public buildings, projects and roads and operated large arts, drama, media and literacy projects. It fed children and redistributed food, clothing and housing. Until it was closed down by Congress, the various programs of the WPA added up to the largest employment base in the countryindeed, the largest cluster of government employment opportunities in most states. Anyone who needed a job could become eligible for most of its jobs; hourly wages were the prevailing wages in the area, the rules said workers could not work more than 30 hours a week but many projects included months in the field, with workers eating and sleeping on worksites. Before 1940, there was some training involved in teaching new skills and the projects original legislation went forward with strong emphasis on family, training and building people up. In 1940 the WPA changed policy and began vocational educational training to make the workers available for factory jobs.

Sounds good, sounds like something people in this country could benefit from now! While our unemployment numbers havent reached the same levels as during the Depression, they continue to rise and the need for infrastructure repair makes a convincing argument for revival of New Deal-type programs.

We all saw what happens when repairs arent made or structures arent inspected last year when the bridge in Minneapolis collapsed. Did you know that more than one in four of Americas nearly 600,000 bridges need significant repair or are burdened with more traffic than they were designed to carry? A third of our major roadways are in substandard condition; the number of dams that could fail has grown 134% since 1999; and the most disgusting and threatening to our public health: aging and inadequate sewer systems spill an estimated 1.26 trillion gallons of untreated sewage every year, resulting in an estimated $50.6 billion in cleanup costs.

The U.S. department of Transportation estimates that every $1 billion invested in transportation infrastructure generates $2 billion in economic activity. Most estimates also say that every billion dollars spent on infrastructure creates between 40,000 and 50,000 jobs.

We are in desperate need of repair of our bridges, roads, and schools, and now in the midst of another natural disaster that increases this so much more. For some reason we can find funds to rebuild Iraq but not our own country.

But why does this have to be a public works program? Why not use private contractors like they did after Katrina? Probably the best example of why private contractors are the worst possible option, look to D.C. over the past several weeks. About 600 Indian workers were brought to do rebuilding work in New Orleans, paid exorbitant fees to come here, were promised permanent residence, lived and worked like slaves, all as guest workers. They staged a 20+ day hunger strike to raise awareness of their plight, resulting in Congressional investigations into the misconduct of their employer.

Now the question I pose to all of you is what is to be done? How can we fight for these kinds of jobs, training programs, and summer jobs programs? What is being done? In Chicago a grassroots coalition is forming to pressure local officials to introduce legislation for a new jobs program. How can we all do this, locally and nationally, and use the election year to our advantage? How can we include this in our election work? What other kinds of jobs do we need to advocate for and how?

Comments