President Obama continued his visits to different parts of America to discuss the economy. This is his attempt to use the Bully Pulpit of the Presidency to direct a national dialogue. The president said, “There are no simple tricks to grow the economy. What we need is a serious, steady, long-term American strategy that reverses the long erosion of middle-class security and gives everyone a fair shot to get ahead.”
This week, President Obama kicked off a series of talks to America's working families on the economy. He started in Galesburg, Ill., where he succinctly described a solution to our economic troubles: making the middle class the engine of American prosperity. Obama said:
I care about one thing and one thing only, and that’s how to use every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term to make this country work for working Americans again.
The huge export of American jobs (some 6 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade) by U.S. corporations has become a focal point of the presidential campaign. Today, a new report from the Center for American Progress ( CAP ) outlines how Republican Mitt Romney ’s proposals would:
encourage and further accelerate the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries.
More confirmation that the extremely rich are getting richer and those without jobs are suffering even more. In 2009 and 2010, the first year of the current “recovery,” the 1 percent captured 93 percent of U.S. income growth. Repeat: 93 percent of income growth went to the 1 percent.
This is a cross-post from the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO blog by Karen Hickey in AFL-CIO Field Communications.
Jobless constituents of U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan are sitting-in at his Kenosha office demanding to speak with him about the jobs crisis and his job creation plans for Wisconsin—yet Rep. Ryan is nowhere to be seen.
So, even as there are still 4.7 workers for every one job , the jobs that are being created are primarily low-wage—and the wages in those jobs have fallen disproportionately, according to a new report by the National Employment Law Project ( NELP ).
From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, the most recent data available, lower-wage occupations grew by 3.2 percent, with retail salespersons, office clerks, cashiers, food preparation workers and stock clerks topping the list. Mid-wage occupations, including paralegals, customer service representatives and machinists, grew by only 1.2 percent, while higher-wage occupations declined by 1.2 percent, which includes occupations like engineers, registered nurses and finance workers.
It’s been four years since low-wage workers got a raise. Sign the petition to tell Congress it’s time to raise the minimum wage.
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