The trend in job loss has been a hallmark of the Bush administration—3 million more workers are without jobs today than when President Bush took office, and more workers are unemployed now than at anytime in the last 10 years. From the standpoint of the growing ranks of unemployed, the president’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2002 may have padded the pockets of the very rich, but they failed to create jobs. More of the same medicine in the form of his 2003 tax cut will not put people back to work.
The unemployment crisis in America is at historic proportions. It now takes a laid-off worker an average of 19.6 weeks to find a new job, the longest amount of time since January 1984. And in February, a record 43 percent of laid-off workers were still without a job when they ran out of unemployment benefits. Despite the severity of the jobs crisis, the Republicans in Congress and Bush administration refused Democratic requests to offer an emergency extension of 26 weeks of benefits to all laid-off workers. As a result, 80,000 laid-off workers are running out of benefits each week.
Yet the Bush administration continues to undermine the best interests of workers and the economy. Its trade policies hurt the nation’s bleeding manufacturing sector, which lost another 53,000 jobs in May, for a total of more than 2 million jobs lost since the beginning of 2001. And the Department of Labor wants to cut millions from receiving overtime pay, a move that discourages new hiring by giving employers a way to have fewer employees do more hours of work for the same amount of money.
The jobs crisis will not end until President Bush realizes that attacking workers’ rights, wages and job opportunities puts the entire national economy in the line of fire.
Contact: Kathy Roeder (202) 637-5018
