When Republican candidates ask Americans if they’re better off than they were four years ago when President Obama was elected, here’s what working people will be thinking about, according to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka: Former President George W. Bush lost U.S. jobs during a good economy. Obama has created jobs during the disastrous economy he inherited.

Trumka, questioned on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program this morning by Peter Wallsten of The Washington Post and Melanie Trottman of the Wall Street Journal, challenged viewers to imagine how improved the economy could be today if Republicans in Congress had worked with Obama on job creation rather than pursuing their stated top priority of making him a one-term president.

In a televised panel discussion yesterday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka handily put Mitt Romney’s economic polices into perspective: stale and failed.

Countering comments by Romney economic adviser Vin Weber that corporate taxes need to be lowered and deregulation pushed forward, Trumka noted that George W. Bush followed that same prescription with the result that after his eight years as president,

there were fewer jobs in America when he left office then when he came into office. If those were such a great prescription, why did they almost destroy the economy?

“That was the turning point for a lot of actors," said actor Susan Sarandon to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka about the national commercial actors strike 12 years ago. "It wasn’t until we felt threatened that we realized the importance of our union.”

In a casual moment in a midtown Manhattan hotel Friday evening, Sarandon, a longtime member of SAG-AFTRA, and Trumka spoke at length before she introduced him to a gathering held by Local 1 of the American Federation of School Administrators.

A banner for Atlas Media Corp. fluttered in a light breeze above 36th Street in Manhattan. In this morning's sunlight on the sidewalk below, nearly 100 nonfiction TV writers and producers, members of the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), waved signs and chanted, demanding health care benefits and better treatment.

Then they staged a footrace, complete with numbered bibs and a finish line held on one end by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, that was dubbed a “Race to the Top” to end the “race to the bottom” at Atlas—a company named for the right-wing polemical novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Yesterday, 40 members of the National Taxi Workers Alliance (NTWA) and taxi workers from San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia cheered, chanted and waved signs outside the Midtown Operating Corp. garage in Long Island City, N.Y. Their messages: “Lower the Lease!” and “Stop the Greed!” In the midst of the drivers were AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and NTWA Executive Director Bhairavi Desai, who hollered into the bullhorn, “We’re your union! Taxi drivers unite!” The NTWA has held 50 such marches in the past four months to protest crippling fees that guarantee profits for owners of taxicabs and medallions and a tough existence for drivers.

Former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Peter Schaumber, involved in an ethics probe by the board’s inspector general, no longer is an adviser to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to a report in The Hill.

“It’s hardly a coincidence that Schaumber resigned from the Romney campaign the same time that his inside source at the board was notified he was being investigated,” says AFL-CIO spokesperson Alison Omens.

This week’s reports from The New York Times that found “credible evidence that bribery played a persistent and significant role in Wal-Mart’s rapid growth in Mexico” are breathtaking, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a Huffington Post column. 

Nothing like this has happened since the collapse of Enron and Worldcom in 2002. And Wal-Mart is, of course, a more important company than either Enron or Worldcom. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the United States.

A Los Angeles Times column today echoes the AFL-CIO's call to increase Social Security benefits and shut down talk of benefit cuts.

Mark Ayers, president of the Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) and an AFL-CIO vice president, passed away yesterday morning. Prior to his election in 2007, Ayers served as the director of the Construction and Maintenance Department of the Electrical Workers (IBEW). A U.S. Navy veteran, Ayers also chaired the AFL-CIO Union Veterans Council.

The U.S. economy added 120,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 8.2 percent, according to the Labor Department report released this morning. Economists had predicted stronger job growth, in line with recent months when 200,000 or more jobs were created.