Working people in Colorado have the shakes—actually, the Harlem Shake. The Colorado AFL-CIO created a Harlem Shake video in support of House Bill 1292, the "Keep Jobs in Colorado Act," which is being heard Monday in the State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee. The bill is sponsored by Democrats Pete Lee (Colorado Springs) and Dan Pabon (Denver).

The nation’s economy added just 88,000 new jobs in March while the jobless rate dipped to 7.6% from February’s 7.7%, according to  figures released this morning  by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

While the 88,000 jobs created reflect 36 straight months of positive job growth, during the previous 12 months job growth had averaged about 169,000 a month. The small number of new jobs also shows how important it is that Congress repeals the sequester to stop any additional job loss in the public and private sectors. These across-the-board cuts will cost more than 750,000 jobs this year alone and could derail the economic recovery.

We already covered how  sequestration cuts will affect your state , but here's an update on the pain these cuts are causing in communities across the country since they went into effect March 1. 

Think these cuts aren't painful? Think again. Here are some highlights on the sequester's reign of terror after the jump.

Calling sequestration “just a fancy word for a dumb idea,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the 750,000 job-killing, across-the-board budget cuts and other moves toward fiscal austerity will “further weaken the economy and cost jobs” and make even worse “the crisis of mass unemployment. Millions of Americans who want to work cannot find jobs.”

Writing in a special report in The Hill on jobs and the economy, Trumka says:

On some days, it seems like all of official Washington is racing to embrace the most destructive consensus since the Iraq war.

Ten years ago this week, the United States launched the invasion of Iraq. The nation remains divided on the wisdom, strategy and outcome of the war that claimed the lives of 4,488 U.S. service members and left more than 32,000 wounded.  

But there is one certainty—the men and women who honorably fought and served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade have come home to an economy that works even less for them than it does others. Job loss, stagnant wages and a widening gap between working families and the wealthy and Wall Street are some of these problems.  

There’s no skills gap holding back recovery in the job market or the broader economy, despite contrary claims from some politicians and CEOs. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, History, Economic Development and Urban Studies professor Marc V. Levine reviewed scientific literature on the skills gap concept and  found no evidence  to support it.

If New Hampshire’s lawmakers are “serious about encouraging New Hampshire's economic development, they will consider re-establishing the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation,” writes New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie in a column on SeaCoastOnline , a website for several state newspapers. 

In 2011, Republican legislators repealed the state’s minimum wage law. Rep. Carol McGuire (R) went so far as to suggest that there should be no wage floor at all and if an employer wanted to pay $5 an hour that was just fine with her.

The recently opened Chobani yogurt plant—the world’s largest—in Twin Falls, Idaho, and several major construction projects—including a new steel mill—in the Youngstown, Ohio, area have been a boon for the skilled Electrical Workers ( IBEW ) members there who have been a blessing for the construction managers tasked with getting the jobs done quickly and efficiently.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) continues to lead the Republican charge to the March 1 deadline, when arbitrary, across-the-board sequestration cuts in everything from mental health services to public safety kick in. In a cynical drive to wring massive concessions in cuts from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Boehner and the Republicans are willing to inflict hardships on working families and bring disaster to the economy.

In 2008, with the global financial crisis at its peak and the world teetering on the brink of a second Great Depression, world leaders and policymakers took decisive fiscal and monetary policy actions that bolstered our economies and stopped our financial system from spiraling into chaos and dragging our economies into depression.

But today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the “Trans-Atlantic Agenda for Shared Prosperity” economic summit: 

Our work is far from done, and no progress has been easy. We have had to battle those who wanted to block the fiscal stimulus, which was so critical for halting our economic slide. And we are still battling those same opponents who now want to impose strict fiscal austerity that threatens to sabotage our economy and trigger a new recession, as those same policies have in Europe.