With U.S. job growth glacially slow — and likely to be depressed further by Republican policies, the labor movement came out swinging last week. Unions attacked the political barriers in both parties to forging an adequate response to the nation’s central — but largely neglected — challenge, the need for more robust job creation.
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, who led a delegation of more than 60 union leaders to a White House meeting with President Barack Obama on Tuesday, called for a sense of urgency equaling the level of agitation over raising the debt ceiling. Rejecting token measures, he said job creation programs must be on the scale needed to dramatically reduce the persistently high jobs deficit.
While targeting the Tea Party wing of the GOP, Trumka and the AFL-CIO Executive Council (EC) also expressed, though more obliquely, their displeasure with many Democrats, including the president. In an unusually strong statement, the EC said:
Unfortunately, far too many Democrats have been either silent or complicit in the Republicans’ scheme. We expect Democrats at every level of government to stand tall for progressive principles, working families and the American labor movement. We need their leadership — not their excuses or apologies.
The EC also took an uncharacteristically strong stand for withdrawing all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, ending militarization of US foreign policy and investing in domestic job creation:
There is no way to fund what we must do as a nation without bringing our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. The militarization of our foreign policy has proven to be a costly mistake. It is time to invest at home.
Job figures for July, released on Friday, showed modest increases in private sector employment, undercut by public sector job losses as state and local governments slashed budgets and workforces. The unemployment rate dropped by a tenth of a percent to 9.1 percent but only because the share of the population that is looking for a job declined to the previous low point of the recession.
Now 40 percent of the officially unemployed have been out of work for six months or more and face the loss of long-term unemployment benefits (up to 99 weeks in some states) that expire at the end of the year. Republicans have announced they will not renew the assistance. Last year when they pulled the same maneuver, Obama gave up on his plan to let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire in exchange for some Republican support for a one-year renewal of long-term unemployment aid.
The slowness in hiring is both a symptom and contributing cause of the weak recovery. And Republican tactics and policies, including the debt ceiling deal that Obama and many Democrats supported, are likely to eliminate huge numbers of jobs over the next year.
Republican Job Killers
The Economic Policy Institute calculates that changes implied by the debt deal will cost the nation 1.8 million jobs through the end of next year, depressing employment and demand right when it is most needed for a recovery. (EPI figures dropping the payroll tax holiday will cost 972,000 jobs, ending long-term unemployment aid will eliminate 528,000 jobs, and discretionary budget cuts for next year will destroy 323,000 jobs.)
Republicans also caused the short-term loss of some 74,000 to 90,000 jobs in government and construction — and the loss of $390 million in fees the airlines would otherwise have paid — by holding hostage passage of comprehensive funding for the Federal Aviation Authority — or even the 21st temporary extension in four years.
They insisted on rolling back a ruling by the National Mediation Board (which enforces much of labor law in the rail and air industries), creating union recognition rules that were more fair to workers and more like the rules of the National Labor Relations Board elections. Delta, the least unionized major airline, lobbied Republicans to re-instate the old rules, which counted any worker who did not vote as a vote against the union. (Trumka said he might agree to those old rules if Republican incumbents would stand for re-election under a similar balloting regime.)
The Center for American Progress also calculates that Rep. John Mica’s (R-FL) proposed cuts in transportation funding would cost over 492,000 jobs, and Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Medicaid cuts and transformation would eliminate as many as three million jobs.
But even the free trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia that Obama is promoting — and would win most Republicans’ support if Obama dropped his plans for expanded trade adjustment assistance — could cost around 213,000 jobs, according to the AFL-CIO.
Labor’s Lines in the Sand
The AFL-CIO EC statement pointedly warned every politician — including the occupant of the Oval Office — that labor unions and allies would fight any cuts in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. But Trumka said the meeting with Obama focused on jobs, and he blasted the Republicans’ stance as bad economic policy, heartless social policy, and cynical political calculation:
That’s what the entire meeting was about — the need for job creation, the need for government to stand in and invest in the future, the need to prevent the crumbling infrastructure of the country from dragging the rest of the economy down…
We asked him to do it at the scale necessary to solve the problem, not at the scale that they think the Republicans are willing to accept, because at this point the Republicans aren’t willing to accept anything. They’ve proven that. They don’t care about the economy. They don’t care about job creation. They only care about stymieing this president and preventing the economy from getting back on the mend because they think that’s their best advantage for 2012.
The EC warned that “we cannot build a future by watering down bad ideas — or even by stopping them. Working people demand a politics of real solutions” — good jobs, public investment, fair taxes, fair trade, and a voice for working people “in the workplace and the voting booth.” In the short run that translates into renewed long-term unemployment benefits, Surface Transportation Act funding, an infrastructure bank, countercyclical aid to state and local government, fairer taxes, and enforcement of trade laws (but apparently no direct public service jobs program).
To shift Washington’s attention to job creation, the AFL-CIO has launched an on-line petition and, with allies, plans for 450 actions in August aimed at political leaders, especially Congress members in their home states and districts. It’s a start, but changing the nation’s focus to jobs will require more Wisconsin-style, energetic grass-roots mobilization, not pro forma delegations or desultory protests. The challenge is huge, but the labor movement sounds serious about its intentions. Let’s hope so. The country desperately needs a strong push back on track.
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David Moberg, a former senior editor of In These Times, was on staff with the magazine from when it began publishing in 1976 until his passing in July 2022. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.
