By any objective measure, our national economy is not in recovery, but rather is still in serious trouble. The latest July figures from the U.S. Department of Labor show that unemployment remains at a very high 9.5%, while in the construction industry the jobless rate continues to hover at or near 20% nationwide and many of the unemployed have been without a job for over 6 months. The skilled construction workers who have built this great country are growing increasingly desperate, and yet, politicians of both parties and the mainstream media are ignoring their suffering.
People like Andrew Fonger. Andrew is in his mid-30s, and lives and works in the Washington, DC area as a member of Local 10 of the International Union of Elevator Constructors. He is married and the father of a 1 year old daughter. While the media likes to say that Washington, D.C. is recession proof because lobbyists and lawyers are fully employed, try telling that to Andrew. He has been unemployed since January, and like millions of other Americans, Andrew is facing excruciatingly painful decisions. He and his wife have already had to eliminate any notion of putting money aside for their daughter's college education, because what little savings they have, combined with what Andrew collects from unemployment insurance goes exclusively to make the payments on their home and to meet the $1,100 per month payment required for Andrew to retain his health benefits under COBRA. And like far too many Americans these days, Andrew is facing the prospect that "when the savings are gone, the next thing is the house."
Or take Jackie Partridge, a member of the Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 7 from Colorado, who has also been unemployed for over seven months. Her skills and hard work used to earn her a weekly paycheck over $800. Now she is on her second extension of unemployment benefits with two teenagers to support. She says:
I thought about maybe getting two $10 jobs somewhere, and I can't. I've got two kids that aren't over 18, and I'm the only caretaker. And I can't afford to be away from them for 20 hours a day... And even my son, he's 15, and he wants to get a job, and there's not even anything for him to try to help out.
Both Andrew and Jackie are skilled construction professionals, who have completed extensive multi-year apprenticeship programs and have years of on-the-job experience. Unfortunately, those skills are sitting idle while our infrastructure and schools crumble. They both are even looking for work outside the construction industry, despite their skills which normally make them highly desirable to many employers. It breaks my heart to hear their stories and hundreds of thousands just like them, when I know that there isn't a community in this country that doesn't have a bridge, school, or power plant that needs retooling.
We all know that during these past several months Jackie and Andrew could have been gainfully employed, growing the wealth of the U.S.A. Not only would their work add value on its own, but it would benefit the small businesses that overwhelmingly make up the construction industry, generate revenue for manufacturers, and increase tax receipts for state, local and the federal governments.
Furthermore, as they continue to remain unemployed, there is a corresponding decline in income and consumer demand. In a recession, that kind of decline can degenerate into a vicious downward spiral, as those who are still employed, seeing the threat of unemployment looming, choose to save rather than spend. As a result, demand is further reduced, more people are laid off, and the downward spiral continues.
Our nation can no longer to ignore the suffering of the unemployed who so desperately want to get back to productive work. Nor can we afford to indulge our leaders' penchant for delay and political posturing, which comes at the expense of millions of working American families who are hurting. What we need now are bold approaches to economic recovery that will produce jobs.
Our economy needs job-creating investments, because tax breaks won't cut it. Why would they, when U.S. corporations are already sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash. In fact, corporate profits today are greater than they were at the height of the most recent bubble, and yet job creation is virtually at a standstill. With statistics like these staring them in the face, the time is now for policymakers in Washington to develop initiatives that will put America's skilled construction workers back on the job.
Businesses are sitting on their mountains of cash, because they do not foresee sustained demand for their goods and services. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will not solve this problem. What we need are investments that will boost demand and create long-term economic growth - investments like re-building our nation's infrastructure for the 21st century and transforming the way our nation develops and uses energy.
Tax breaks for the wealthy never built a bridge or an airport. They never increased American productivity by reducing traffic congestion, increasing broadband service, or creating a modern energy grid. The most fundamental step in boosting our economy is to get American workers back on the job. Getting people back to work affects the momentum of the economy, which ultimately creates the cycle of private-sector job creation that we need.
It's impossible to overstate the threat that this crisis of unemployment poses to the well-being of the United States. Entire communities - both rural and metropolitan - are going under. We need to immediately build on the successes of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and use scarce federal dollars in the most efficient way to boost demand and get the unemployed back to work.
You can find Andrew and Jackie's stories and others just like them, whose struggles during this recession have gone ignored on BackOnTheJob.org. Until we simultaneously tackle the jobs crisis facing the construction industry and our dilapidated infrastructure, our nation will not get back on track, nor will we be able to build the shining, hopeful, 21st century vision of America that President Obama was elected to build. And that, brothers and sisters, would be a tragedy for all the Andrews and Jackies waiting and hoping to get back on the job.
Mark H. Ayers is the President of the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO - an alliance of 13 national and international unions that collectively represent over 2 million skilled craft professionals in the United States and Canada.
"Spend money on roads and bridges, spend money on unemployeement insurance, spend money on direst home refinance that lowers the amount people have to spend on their mortgages. increase Social Security payments"
The money you suggest spending comes from taxes, creating an unsustainable and never ending cycle. The money that needs to be spent has to be earned from the private sector to establish any long term recovery. If you use tax dollars as you suggest, what happens when that money runs out? more taxes??? Supply side economics does work because business and people are not mutually exclusive, remember PEOPLE work for companies and by the companies being able to hire and pay employees they will have money abd spend it. It's no coincidence that throughout history when taxes were lowered tax revenues that were collected by the federal government increased. There is no way to tax your way out of a recession, just can't happen...When they took that route in the 30-40's it took WW2 to get us out and I'd rather not revisit that scenario..
The former Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, is now rebuking the popular GOP Supply-Side talking point (as trumpeted recently by Mitch McConnell) that tax cuts increase revenues, and therefore help reduce deficits:
“They should follow the law and let [Bush's tax cuts] lapse,” Greenspan said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff,” citing a need for the tax revenue to reduce the federal budget deficit. [...]
Americans having even food and shelter is now radical left
The governement is supporting industries and corporations
If Eisenhower were alive today Gibbs would call him a radical
The only reason Gibbs doesn't say commie or red is that we would laugh. This is WH and Obamas position
Why is that so difficult for "progressives" to fathom?
In any event, I don't know what people in the building trades make, but if the bricklayer cited in the article is representative, I've got to wonder. I'm only in my mid-40s, yet I can remember when such "blue-collar" workers were held up as representatives of the "American Dream." They could own a home, send their kids to college, etc. Many of them as single-income families!
Have the proportions (income versus cost of living) gotten so skewed that this is no longer possible, or did these skills simply become devalued, or what?
I see a lot of talk in here about which party has the right approach to job creation, or which party is to blame for unemployment, etc. But what kind of jobs are going to be created, and will people be able to realize their "American Dream" through them? I worry that the answer, increasingly, will be "No."
Well.... the LONG-TERM answer will be "yes". Generations hence, people will be thinking about going into the new-demand careers from an early age, will be trained into them, and things will be fine.
The problem is the short-term. What do you do with all of the scribes after the printing press takes off? What do you do with all of the lamp-lighters when the electrical grid is put in place?
Change in society always creates turmoil.
WRONG!
Big Government policy under Democrats creates the killer for renewed business investments and consumer spending, uncertainty. New regulations, new taxes, new mandates, new fees, new panels, new commissions from government all affect business and personal incentive to invest and grow, which means taking risks. If the cost of hiring a person is 70% higher than the wages they will receive, because of taxes, forced health insurance, forced state compensation insurance and other up-front costs, let alone liability insurance for the plethora of work-related lawsuits, then I as a businessman will hire fewer people and not grow as fast, were I to hire the people I wanted and needed.
Very simple, if you think it through.
Because business CANNOT be trusted to do what is right when it comes to any number of things...How many times have we seen deregulation and allowing business to, "Keep their own house clean", only to see how affording them more rope only results in more focus on making more profit ahead of everything and everyone? THIS is a reason I wouldn't hand a business a tax break that would improve their bottom line in order to pay their workers better wages. They get the tax break and the workers get jack squat....But ah, management seems to somehow find ways to add to their own salaries and bonuses, don't they? You want a tax break? Fine. 67% of whatever you add to your bottom line as a result of that break MUST go directly to hourly employees OUTSIDE of management for wage increases or else you loose the tax break...Oh, that's another mandate, huh?
See what I am saying here? If you don't mandate that's what must be done with the revenue realized from a tax break then you will surely never see that money trickle any further down the line than the company ownership, executives and management. Thus, you CANNOT trust business to do the right thing most of the time WITHOUT it being mandated by law or regulation.
You must not be a business person, I am, and the last thing I need is a bunch of bureaucrats running the show, or telling me what to do. I'm in finance, the paperwork has grown ten-fold on doing anything, all wasted paper because if anything goes wrong or there's fraud, then the law takes over, not the paperwork and all the disclaimers.
Government enforcing the law, fine; government setting standards, ie, drive on the right, 4 quarts = 1 gallon, fine; government regulating traffic on the roads by timing traffic lights to keep a smooth flow, fine; government forcing people to buy health insurance, no thanks; government in any business like medicare, which means fraud, waste, cronyism, again no thanks.
Which new jobs would you create in the energy sector?
Your government funding is on the way...
Visit www.savingpontiac.org for the detail!
The government, running up the national credit card with no way to pay it back? No thanks, enough is enough.
Corporations offshore jobs because they can with full help of the government who wants to end producing labor comparisons with other countries:
http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0212/BLS.html
Obama Puts BLS's International Labor Comparison Program On Chopping Block
The manufacturing labor rate of India and Communist China is ~3% of that in the U.S. That information will stop after the BLS's International Labor Comparison Program is ended.
It's NOT just manufacturing and IT jobs that are being offshored. If a job can be done at a desk or a computer, it can be offshored. Google for "nighthawking radiologists"
There is a FREE Job Destruction Newsletter at:
http://www.jobdestruction.com/
We recently had the public relations spectacle of Billionaires pledging some of their wealth to charity. These hollow people will use charities and foundations to protect and preserve their wealth for their own personal objectives. Since this nation was so generous to them, if they were true PATRIOTS, the Billionaires would turn over all their wealth in excess of $1 Billion to the government for debt reduction. However, because their only god is wealth, this will not happen.
Businesses would race back to the United States ... foreign capital would follow ... industry would ignite ... and jobs would be created in abundance.
The current 2 party political system is corrupt ... dishonest ... stagnant ... and failing "all" Americans.
I believe in the American economy ... but I do not believe in the American government.
Capital investment creates jobs. It is reasonable to think that in an economy with pent up capital, it will require an incentive for those institutiions with capital to infuse into bbuying durable goods and services thus creating jobs. The issue with the entire situation is that until we have a plan to solve the housing and real estate mess the economy will limp along at decimal point growth for the next 20 years. Sad but true.....the dough already spent could have modified millions of motgages and we would be well on our way out of this but Mr. Geitner needed to grease some palms and thank some heavy hitters for votes...again, sad but true. see you round the bar in Costa Rica.
Their kooks like Ryan, Buck, Angle,Paul and Palin's TPMisfits and others, want to rip S/S to shreds, do away with Medicare, and the Education Department. How much plainer can they be ? They want to finish the destruction they started.
It was not Obama who bled jobs in the millions. It was Bush and these SAME REPUBLICANS who added not one job in a decade. You don't fix the problem overnight, and you don't see one Republican roll up their sleeves and have the guts to pass a Stimulus to get the jobs started again.
Deficits will take care of themselves when taxpaying millions are working again and sending revenue to Washington or start buying products again.
I hope those that moved jobs overseas, are now going broke, when the consumers in this country do not have a penny to buy their goods, made with slave labor.
I believe that would be from 1994-2007 and 8 years of disasterous Bush/Cheney regime.
Even after the Dems got back in the majority, it is a happy illusion that they ever had a Senate majority. With the wrong way Republican's fancy 60 votes to bring a vote up, added to secret fillibusters and delaying tactics. Dems never had that 60 vote majority.
Do we need to further arm ourselves to prevent the govt (since yourside controls it) from trying what you suggest?
When was the last time you "bought American"?
We don't swing from the trees, bleeting about "next time we will come armed" like you nuts.
BTW...Go ahead and make my day.....and bring out your gun toting knuckle dragging Wyatt Earps and let's see them fight the US Military. Go On...
Does my Ford Escape classify as "American"? Who knows....parts are shipped into this country from everywhere. Still, I would stop imports with heavy tariffs.
Now, what were you saying...........?
Here is a link about this issue: http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio/publications/magazine/0903_amjobs.cfm
Take in account that a lot of the R+D, and trainning was made by the public university system, they are transfering a knowledge that not only belongs to the companies, but also to the society. The main problem, the suicidal behavior, is the knowledge + technological transfer more than the facilities' transfer
It is not a problem if China put some tax to US imports, there are no goods to tax, so we will not have any problem at all, the trade deficit is too huge
What we have to avoid is the social and environmental dumping that now exists thanks to the outsourcing policy, the trend is: we must have slaves wages in order to compete with other people with slave wages oversea, and this independently of your background or skills, and also we must have our environmental deteriorating to maintain here the industries or they will be close and sent oversea
Before the "Big Outsourcing" starts there was a competitive economy, and we have to maintain an economic competition with others countries that mantain certains levels of labour and environmetal protection, not with states based on authoritarian and slavery labour rules and without any environmetal policy
We are not going to get the millions of jobs back tomorrow, that the Bush regime spent 8 years decimating. Anyone that thinks that, is only dreaming. No one could bridge that hurdle, not even Obama.
http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/free_trade_agreement_with_korea_will_cost_u.s._jobs/
News from EPI: Free Trade Agreement with Korea will cost U.S. jobs
The Obama administration wants to end the BLS program that tells us other countries' manufacturing labor rates::
http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0212/BLS.html
Obama Puts BLS's International Labor Comparison Program On Chopping Block
For example, India's rate is only 3% of ours:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2010/05/art1full.pdf
A President whose top corporate campaign contributor was Goldman Sachs will do what he's asked for corporations:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638
Top Contributors to Barack Obama | OpenSecrets
They also contributed to McCain's campaign
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00006424
Top Contributors to John McCain | OpenSecrets
I have great respect for the trade, craft, serivce and professional unions. None of those union workers are ever going to get fithy rich. Yet they are all highly trained, knowledgeable, accountable, ethical workers. Those workers provide the foundation and structure of our middle class.
The unions protect the workers from exploitation. Look at neighboring Mexico for an example of non-unionized worker abuses and slave wages under the yoke of corporate greed. The unions safe-guard the working middle class. We need to stand by the union workers in solidarity. We can see at this moment how unregulated union-bustin corporate greed has brought our middle class to its knees. Without a strong working middle class, our social conditions fall into the abysmal state that we are in currently.
Keep shouting, Mr. Ayres. You represent the working class.
The unions is just another corrupt guy with his hand out for your paycheck. That protects the guy that would normally get that crappy raise. The only thing they protect is that stream of cash from your pocket to thiers.
As a white collar worker for a large oil company, I didn't turn down what OCAW won during strikes.
One survey says corporations prefer dictatorships:
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/econ101/survey.html
Globalization Survey Reveals U.S. Corporations Prefer Dictatorships
Every organization needs oversight: corporations, unions, government.
Remembering the Stanford Prison Experiment explains why:
http://www.prisonexp.org/
The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment