Working people are applauding the Los Angeles County Metro Board of Directors vote last week in favor of a sweeping, agency-wide program that will create 260,000 construction jobs. Officials said the program will dramatically increase the number of workers hired from communities near upcoming transit projects and special attention will be given to applicants who live in areas of high unemployment.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka joined AFT President Randi Weingarten at the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Annual Meeting yesterday to announce progress in the labor movement’s commitment to investing in infrastructure, clean energy retrofitting and job training.

Unions and progressive organizations are calling the American Jobs Act that President Obama presented to a joint session of Congress last night a vital and essential step to restoring the nation’s economy and putting America back to work.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued the following statement on President Obama’s jobs and the economy proposal that he presented to a joint session of Congress tonight.

The President took an important and necessary step tonight: he started a serious national conversation about how to solve our jobs crisis. He showed working people that he is willing to go to the mat to create new jobs on a substantial scale. Tonight’s speech should energize the nation to come together, work hard and get serious about jobs.

The only thing congressional Republicans have done about the nation’s job crisis is to make it worse by standing in the way of  job creation and pushing a budget proposal—which Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) equates to ”applying leeches to a patient who needs a transfusion.”

The BlueGreen Alliance says that reauthorizing the fully funded Surface Transportation bill that President Obama today urged Congress to extend is “an incredibly important step in achieving our number one national priority: putting America to work.”

The nation needs to spend $1.7 trillion by 2020 to shore up its infrastructure, or it could lose more than 876,000 jobs, and hold back the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth by $3.1 trillion in the next nine years, according to a new report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

If you missed Monday’s AFL-CIO forum on “The Jobs Crisis—Moving to Action: A Dialogue Between Workers and Policymakers,” the full event is now viewable on C-SPAN here.

Shonda Sneed of Yellow Springs, Ohio, was laid off in December 2009 and is about to run out of unemployment benefits. Because of state budget cuts, she also could soon lose the health care nurse who helps care for her mother who has dementia. At the last job she applied for, she was told 450 others had also applied for the same position.

In an astounding display of economic shortsightedness, House Republicans want to cut transportation and transit infrastructure funding so deeply that it would cost half a million jobs next year alone and send the nation’s highways, bridges and transit systems into even deeper disrepair.