This is the third in a series of diaries which began with For a Union of the Unemployed and A Call to Organize: CREATEJobsNow!
Another 787,000 Americans joined the ranks of the unemployed last month, and the unemployment rate increased to 9.4%. 14.5 million Americans are unemployed, more than at any time during the Great Depression. Add the 9.1 million underemployed and the 2.2 million "discouraged" workers and there are now an astonishing 25.8 million Americans unemployed or underemployed.
The critical need to re-employ America is not yet being addressed on the scale required to meet this challenge. But there is good news. Major organizing efforts are underway to build both the grassroots movement and the broader coalition that will be needed in the coming battle for jobs and economic recovery.
The day after the May unemployment report was released, the New York Times editorial News From the Jobs Front concluded:
The Obama administration has been on top of relief efforts, extending and enhancing unemployment and public health benefits and providing a big, early dose of fiscal stimulus (though more will probably be needed).
It has been less vigorous, so far, in its vision and plan for the future. If a jobs recovery is left to its own devices, we could repeat the pattern of the last recession and recovery, in which economic growth resumed but never really benefited most working Americans in terms of pay, wealth or sustainable upward mobility. That would be tragic.
Except, unlike past recessions, an actual recovery from this one requires a substantial jobs plan. Indeed, the magnitude of the employment crisis itself threatens to swamp the modest stabilization that's been aided by the early stages of the recent stimulus plan. As economist Paul Krugman described in his column June 14, "unemployment is very high and still rising", while the economy remains stuck in a "liquidity trap" with a continuing "plunge in private borrowing".
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has helped, somewhat, to stave off what would otherwise have been an unemployment tsunami in the public sector. And while many states and municipalities still face significant cuts in jobs and services, the stimulus has served to offset some of the worst effects of state and local budget crises. As such, it has helped provide a degree of economic stabilization, while extending and modestly increasing unemployment benefits for many.
In short, the stimulus may have done just enough to put the brakes on what was a slide toward a possible full-blown depression, but not enough to foster a robust economic recovery. Far from it. And this is before the coming round of massive layoffs in the auto industry and its suppliers shows up in the unemployment numbers in the coming weeks and months.
As columnist Bob Herbert wrote on May 25
I’m not sure that the catastrophic job losses of this recession, the worst since the Great Depression, have really sunk into the public’s consciousness. And that would mean that the ground has not been prepared for the kind of high-powered remedies needed to get the economy back into some kind of reasonable shape.
So how do we prepare that ground? What ongoing organizing efforts can we build on and what are the kinds of policy initiatives that will need to be pursued in the coming battle for jobs and recovery?
The Health Care Paradigm
Right now, due to the immediacy of the legislative agenda and the urgency of the issue, those efforts are focused primarily on the battle for real health care reform. Because health care, the economy and unemployment are all inextricably linked, fixing health care will benefit the unemployed and help boost the economy. The process, moreover, of organizing the coalition needed to win the health care battle has already set in motion the very forces that will be required in the coming battle for jobs and recovery.
On June 1 a newly formed coalition, Health Care for American Now (HCAN) was announced in Washington to support a real health care plan with a public option. The coalition plans to spend $82 million on advertising, advocacy and outreach to help ensure that the political climate is created to win real health care reform this year.
The historic scope of the coalition, including labor, progressive, policy advocacy and various rights organizations, itself provided an immediate jolt to the politics on the issue. The next day President Obama released a letter to Senators Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus detailing his principles for health care reform which included this clear endorsement of a public insurance plan option:
I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.
The hugely positive popular response was enhanced by the labor-led health care coalition's linking supporters with the DNC's Organizing for America site promoting tens of thousands of sign-ups for thousands of health care house meetings nationwide. Encouraged by the momentum generated by the growing coalition effort, the President went to Green Bay, Wisconsin for the first of a series of major town hall meetings, putting himself squarely on the side of the coalition for real reform, including a public health insurance plan option, and urging everyone to contact their Senators and Representatives in Congress.
Congress is definitely going to get that message when thousands rally for health care at the Capitol on June 25.
All of this is to describe precisely the confluence of efforts that will be needed in the coming battle for jobs and the economy. And there are other signs that this kind of labor-led alliance is coming together elsewhere.
Similar coalition efforts are already working to promote the Employee Free Choice Act,
including the alliances being built by American Rights at Work.
To spearhead the cause of real immigration reform another broad coalition effort, Reform Immigration FOR America, was launched on June 3.
The kind of coalition movement we discussed in the previous posts in this series is not only possible -- it's already forming as the leaders of major union, progressive and civil rights organizations join together in unified campaigns. But the other essential component is effective grassroots organizing, combining field and online outreach.
Building the Grassroots - Organizing Unemployed and non-union workers
One of the organizations that has had great success bringing together employed and unemployed, union and non-union is Working America the grassroots outreach and organizing affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
Working America has already recruited more than 2 million members through its field and online organizing efforts, many of them unemployed or non-union workers. Dan Heck, Regional Director for Working America in Ohio, reports they are now ramping up their unemployed worker organizing and have signed up 800,000 members in Ohio alone, doubling the effective membership of the AFL-CIO in the state.
Local labor councils in Ohio are holding regular meetings of unemployed workers. As a pilot program they are also planning action-oriented meetings of unemployed workers, initially, in 10 cities across the country. Working in concert with local grassroots organizations, Dan reports they are "generating hundreds of calls a week" to State Senators in Ohio to support education initiatives to bring jobs to Ohio workers.
Organizing non-union and unemployed workers has also resulted in more than 7,000 individual, handwritten letters to Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) in support of the Employee Free Choice Act in Arkansas.
I've joined Working America and you should too. And throw them a few bucks while you're at it. Not only are they building the grassroots movement that will be needed to take on the coming battle for jobs and the economy, but their combination of phone, field and internet organizing is exactly what's needed -- on an even bigger scale.
Working America's Unemployment Lifeline offers online information on:
Unemployment compensation
Nutritional aid
Utility assistance
Child care
Emergency medical assistance
and personal Ask an Expert assistance from a knowledgeable organizer.
The Working America blog, which features Daily Kos contributing editor Laura Clawson, offers a look at important news as well as stories from the grassroots, giving workers themselves a powerful voice.
Similarly SEIU has taken a leading role in aggressively reaching out beyond its own 2 million members to actively engage millions more both online and in communities across the country.
SEIU's Change that Works and Economic Recovery campaigns unite the efforts of both union and progressive local organizers behind precisely the three-pronged issue strategy advocated in this series:
Our Goals
* Pass an economic recovery plan to keep people working, create millions of new jobs, and maintain services for our communities.
* Pass the Employee Free Choice Act to ensure that workers, not just CEOs, can benefit from the economic progress they help create and advocate for the best quality for those they serve.
* Fix our healthcare system so that it lowers costs and provides quality, affordable health care for all.
The SEIU Blog and online action alerts provide up-to-the-minute news and mobilizations, such as the email blasts directed at CNBC for comparing the Iran election to the Employee Free Choice Act.
So while the immediate focus is on health care, the Employee Free Choice Act and immigration reform we must look ahead, knowing the urgent need to re-employ America, with productive jobs, with good incomes and promising futures.
What is to be done? First, we'll talk about the organizational side -- both "top-down" and "bottom-up". Then, we'll discuss the policy side -- because there's no "silver bullet", no single legislative initiative that could adequately address the unemployment crisis.
To prepare for the coming battle for jobs and recovery, labor and progressive leaders simply need to recognize that they will have to come together on this issue, as they have on health care, Employee Free Choice and immigration reform.
Right now labor should be ramping up its staffing of both field and online organizers. We need more people across the country like Dan Heck and his teams of field organizers in Ohio. And we need more people like Laura Clawson, Tim Tagaris, Seth Michaels, Michael Whitney, Richard Negri, Tom Wells and Jason Lefkowitz (to name just a few) working online to bring us the news from the frontlines.
And labor, progressives and allied economic policy groups should also be ramping up research and legislative efforts to help initiate and support the array of programs that will be needed.
There's No Silver Bullet
One thing that will make the coming battle for jobs and recovery difficult is that there's no one program, no single piece of legislation capable of adequately addressing the employment crisis. Instead, solutions must be found in an array of bold initiatives. Let's look at just a few.
In a post on his blog last month Robert Reich examined "What Industrial Policy Should Be":
Industrial policy ought to fill in where the market fails -- providing basic research to help spur new technologies and industries, reducing the negative side-effects of the market (such as carbon pollution), and easing the adjustment of workers and communities out of older industries that are shrinking toward new ones. Ideally, these three parts of industrial policy would be synchronized so the new technologies and industries address negative side-effects while also creating opportunities for communities and workers to gain new employment.
Much of the industrial Midwest desperately needs new technologies and industries to take the place of the shrinking U.S. auto industry, and workers who have been (or are about to be) laid off need help transitioning to those new jobs. Could chunks of the old auto industry be adapted to producing high-speed rail or, more generally, highly-efficient people-moving systems of the future or, even more generally, green technologies that support such systems?
A number of prominent economists, such as those listed in an online press release from Dean Baker's Center for Economic and Policy Research, have begun calling for a third round of stimulus to boost the economy. Among them is the Economic Policy Institute's Lawrence Mishel who said recently:
"we must reexamine our policies and enact further public investments as stimulus, provide relief to the many families that are and will be struggling, and use government to directly generate jobs in areas where private sector activity is especially weak."
In their in-depth piece entitled The Jobs Solution for The Nation on April 2, Leo Hindery, Jr. and Donald W. Riegle, Jr. provided a detailed set of plans and proposals designed to create the millions of jobs now required to re-employ America and generate a robust recovery.
We need an all-encompassing strategy on the massive scale we used at Normandy to win the war in Europe and that we later had behind the sweeping Marshall Plan to help rebuild Europe's broken economies. This time, however, our big-thinking strategy must be about creating the 24 million jobs that are missing so that American workers will be nearly fully employed.
In their conclusion they wrote:
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs--24 Million More of Them, in Fact
The need for jobs creation is paramount and massive, and the task of meeting this need will be even greater. FDR had to find 13 million jobs during the worst of the Great Depression, and in 2009 we need to find 24 million, albeit in a much larger economy. But still, that's 24 million jobs!
Roosevelt knew that the answer for his administration would not be found only in the private sector, as ideal as that would have been and as much of a believer in capitalism as he was. The answer today won't be found only there, either.
In addition to the public jobs programs for the nation's youth and the training and apprenticeship programs that we have already called for, the administration and Congress also need to help create millions of jobs for the nation's adults: those who are young, approaching retirement and who were once retired but now need to go back to work.
Specifically, we need a large-scale program to create short- and medium-term jobs that complement those of the companies receiving stimulus-related contracts and subsidies, until these jobs can migrate to the private sector. With thoughtful use of tax policies, we must do everything we can to retain and strengthen the relatively few manufacturing jobs that remain. We need a program that emulates the best of the WPA and the TVA, and then we have to export this program to all fifty states. And we need aggressive public-sector employment initiatives, especially based around infrastructure construction and K-12 education.
None of the actions we call for will be easy to accomplish, nor will they come cheap. Yet we need all of them so that American workers can be fully employed in jobs that pay fair wages. We need them to rebuild, and sustain, the great commercial engines that fostered the broad American middle class of the past century and underpinned the global prosperity of the past quarter-century. We need them to bring an end to America's sorry status as the world's largest debtor nation. And we need them for our national and economic security.
One of their proposals was for a new-style WPA-type program, a call echoed recently by bonddad and New Deal democrat in Do We Need Another WPA?
It is, perhaps, only such a program that could begin to alleviate the crushingly ill effects of this recession on the less-skilled, youth, many minorities, the rural and urban poor documented in the NYT OpEd this week by Barbara Ehrenreich in Too Poor to Make the News.
Back in February Bob Herbert wrote
What Americans need is new employment on a massive scale, and one of the most effective ways to get that started is to invest extraordinary amounts in the nation’s infrastructure, to rebuild America in a way that creates a world-class platform for a sustainable 21st-century economy.
President Obama’s stimulus package is just a first step in the government’s effort to stabilizing the hemorrhaging economy. It contains infrastructure spending, but nothing comparable to the vast amounts it will take to make the desperately needed improvements.
A critical component of any major infrastructure plan to create jobs and long-term growth is the need for a massive Rural Broadband program -- one that could help alleviate the toll that unemployment has taken in rural America.
On the legislative side, some Democrats have been taking bold initiatives to foster large-scale infrastructure programs. In Our Crumbling Foundation columnist Herbert recently highlighted legislation introduced by Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro for a National Infrastructure Development Bank with broad support:
Washington, D.C. – Representatives Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.-3), Keith Ellison (MN-5), Anthony Weiner (NY-9) and Steve Israel (NY-2) introduced the National Infrastructure Development Bank Act of 2009 with strong support from a diverse coalition including, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; SEIU; National Construction Alliance; Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO; American Society of Civil Engineers; Campaign for America’s Future; and Policy Link, as well as Felix Rohatyn, investment banker and author of "Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now;" and Bernard L. Schwartz, Chairman and CEO of BLS Investments.
The National Infrastructure Development Bank Act would fund and create a bank that would direct public and private dollars toward infrastructure projects of national or regional significance – a proposal included in the Obama Administration’s budget, as well as the Budget Resolution.
Such a National Infrastructure Bank has long been supported by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT).
"President Obama co-sponsored our infrastructure bank legislation as a senator and endorsed the idea during his campaign. So, I'm hopeful to see action on the bill this year," Dodd said.
"A national infrastructure bank would ensure that important projects receive funding -- creating a new funding stream and competitive process for wastewater systems or any other project that offers the greatest economic and environmental benefits that no community can afford to rebuild on its own," he said in a speech at North Carolina State University.
"The Infrastructure Bank would encourage regional approaches to infrastructure needs, encouraging private sector participation to fund big projects outside of formulas," he also said according to a copy of the speech.
The fact that significant job-creating infrastructure legislation can be crafted and passed in the Congress was proven recently when the House overwhelmingly passed the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act (H.R. 2187). Sponsored by Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee, chaired by Rep. George Miller (D-CA), it passed the House on May 14 by a vote of 275 to 155 with 24 House Republicans voting in favor! The bill authorizes $6.4 billion in grants in 2010, and similar amounts in each of the next five years, to promote "green" school renovation and modernization projects, including clean energy and HVAC systems in public schools across the country.
Similar legislation has recently been introduced in the Senate (S. 1121) by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Senate aides have reported it will be co-sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT). At a recent Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on education with Sec. Arne Duncan, Sen. Harkin indicated he may pursue the program's first year funding in the Congressional appropriations process.
Let's Get to Work
Much more needs to be done. The toll this recession is taking on working families, on incomes, on the unemployed and underemployed, the rural and urban poor, is simply intolerable. America desperately needs a real economic recovery, one that is powered by investments to create millions of good-paying productive jobs.
A concerted effort by the emerging coalition of labor, progressives, rights organizations and liberal economic policy advocates is what's needed in the coming battle for jobs and recovery.
