A quick bit of news from a few different fronts in the battle for higher union wage jobs.
Pink Slip Demo
Forming a line three miles long, 5,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Manhattan on Super Tuesday to draw attention to the ongoing unemployment crisis in the United States. Participants handed out “pink slips” with demands that Congress pass job creation bills and that corporations stop outsourcing jobs. The demo lasted for 14 minutes, to represent the 14 million unemployed. Read more about this historic action via AFP or the New York Daily News.
States Continue to Feel Recession’s Impact
State budgets are poised to continue to be a drag on the national economy, threatening hundreds of thousands of private- and public-sector jobs, reducing the job creation that otherwise would be expected to occur. Potential strategies for lessening the impact of deep spending cuts include more use of state reserve funds in states that have reserves, more revenue through tax-law changes, and a greater role for the federal government.
Education, Jobs, and Wages
Continuing our dialog on how education factors in to unemployment and wage rates, we offer this article. Two salient points within it are: 1. As an individual, get a bachelor’s degree or you are doomed to work hard for a wage that will not provide a decent standard of living for a family. You may not get such a wage even with a bachelor’s degree, but without it your chances are slim and getting slimmer. 2. But as a society, “the best anti-poverty program around” cannot possibly be “a first-class education” when more than two-thirds of our jobs require nothing like that. The best anti-poverty program around is higher wages for the jobs we actually have and will have.
The Economics of Inequality
Even though the national economy is on the upswing, many Americans haven’t been reaping the benefits. A recent Political Affairs article breaks it down well with several charts and graphs. And CNN puts it bluntly: Economy improves…incomes don’t.
Please make sure to visit the People’s World online for the best in worker’s news!
Other resources to check out:
WeNeedJobsNotCuts.com – UnemployedWorkers.org – Unemployed Nation – JobsNotCuts.org
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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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