On Labor Day, we traditionally recognize the contributions of workers and trade unions to our country, and certainly we have a lot to celebrate. Worker productivity in our country is the highest ever, and the working class heroes who pulled us through 9/11 and its aftermath are doing so again in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And families and businesses who recently lived through the biggest power blackout in the history of the United States and Canada need no further reminder of the worth of workers and our unions. The public safety officers and emergency workers who kept our cities from cascading into chaos were union members. . .and the electrical, transportation and utility workers who got our civilization back up and running in just 24 hours were union members.
But while we as a nation have a lot to celebrate, we also have a lot to contemplate this Labor Day week, because the workers who built and maintain the strongest democracy and the most competitive economy in the history of the world are under siege as never before.
The recession ended nearly two years ago, but workers' wages are stagnating again. Productivity is up in large part because employers are laying off tens of thousands and squeezing more out of the workers left behind.
The stock market is up and profits are up, but we're still losing jobs, with new layoffs every month—indeed, every week—a record job loss for a so-called recovery.
The Labor Department estimated that at the end of July, a total of 15 million U.S. workers were either unemployed, too discouraged to job-hunt or working part-time when they wanted and needed to be working full time.
A disproportionate number of those workers are minorities. Unemployment among African American workers is rising faster than at any time since the 1970s.
It's the worst job market since the Great Depression and here in Michigan it's even more grim. Statewide, unemployment is 7.4 percent and 377,600 men and women are out of work. Forty percent of those workers are here in Detroit, where unemployment is even higher.
But cold statistics don't describe the human suffering. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped us understand what it's like to lose your job when he said, and I quote:
"In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income." You are in substance saying to that man—and I'm sure Dr. King meant to include women—you are saying you have no right to exist.
Brothers and sisters, there are now more than 176,200 people in this grand "Motor City" who have been told they have no right to exist. They are out of work, out of money and out of hope—and that is shameful here in the industrial soul of the richest country in the world.
We have a national jobs crisis of literally historic proportions, a looming catastrophe that is threatening to eclipse the damage done by all the emergencies we've faced over the last two years combined. To add to that, we have a relentless assault on job standards—on wages and health care, on retirement, job safety and workers’ freedom to form unions to improve their lives. These twin emergencies are being ignored—even abetted—by our nation’s leadership in Washington and most of corporate America. And unless we confront this jobs crisis now, irreversible harm will be done to current and future generations of working Americans and our proud, strong nation will never be the same.
The record is clear. The U.S. economy has 3.2 million fewer private sector jobs than it did when George W. Bush took office shortly before the recession began.
More than two and a half million of those lost jobs were the high-paying, good-benefit manufacturing jobs that create other jobs and undergird our economy and lift up communities like Detroit. We're importing $500 billion dollars a year more than we're exporting because U.S. companies and our trade laws and practices have been sending manufacturing jobs overseas at alarming rates.
In the past three years, says a Rutgers University report, nearly one in five U.S. workers lost his or her job. Conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts rightly observes that, "the U.S. economy is creating jobs—but not for Americans."
The damage to human lives as well as to our economic stability is devastating.
Les Caulford of South Lyon, Mich., is 55 years old and a Vietnam veteran. He worked as a crane operator at the Michigan Seamless Tube Division of the Quanex Corp. for 21 years. Battered by cheap imported steel products, the company filed for bankruptcy in November 2000 and Les was laid off. Today, he receives a small plant shutdown pension, but he's exhausted his unemployment benefits and hasn't found a new job.
George Marvel is 43 years old and he's married with one child. He worked for Casle Steel's Dearborn Pickling Division for 13 years, but he's been laid off since May and like Les, he's desperately worried about his future and his family.
Les and George are members of the United Steelworkers of America and they are living examples of the working men and women who are the real heroes of our country. They are with us today and I'd like to ask them both to stand so we can show them some of the respect they deserve.
Brothers and sisters, Les and George are just two of more than 100,000 manufacturing workers in Michigan who have lost their jobs to overseas competition in the last two years.
And now American corporations are racing to add to the crisis by outsourcing millions of white-collar jobs in computer sciences, engineering, financial and medical services.
By the end of this year, according to BusinessWeek, General Electric will have sent a total of 20,000 aircraft, medical and research jobs to India and China.
A group called "WashTech" which is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America recently released a tape of a conference call in which IBM's top human relations executives were discussing transferring three million U.S. service jobs to China and India over the next 12 years.
A Forrester Research study predicts U.S. employers will move about 3.3 million white-collar service jobs and $136 billion in annual wages overseas in the next 15 years.
In other words, U.S. companies and U.S. trade policies are about to do to white collar workers what they've been doing to blue collar workers for the last 10 years—and many of these jobs are not coming back.
If we don't wake up and treat job loss and job deterioration as a national disaster, that deadly combination is going to put our economy down-for-the-count and render the American Dream comatose.
What caused this seismic shift in our job market, which sent industrial employment to its lowest level since 1958, and has so far made George W. Bush the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a decline in total employment during his first term in office?
Well, God didn't send millions of American jobs overseas, and neither did the silent hand of the global marketplace. Our crisis was created by the hand of men and women, members of the United States Congress, and more than abetted by Mr. Bush.
The misery heaped upon Les Caulford and George Marvel and their families is the result of conscious decisions that have institutionalized flawed trade deals; ignored workers’ priorities while pandering to special interests; allowed companies like Wal-Mart to victimize entire communities; and created tax policies that put U.S. companies that want to do the right thing by their employees and their communities at a competitive disadvantage, that drive up the trade deficit and that encourage American firms to move factories and jobs offshore.
And believe me, it has been a decidedly, dastardly, non-partisan affair.
In my opinion, the policies that have led to our jobs crisis were brought about by an earth-shaking shift in our political culture. Increasingly, decisions are being made not on the basis of what helps people or what helps our society, but what helps corporations. And the elected officials making those decisions are more influenced by corporate power—corporate campaign contributions and corporate lobbyists—than they are by political party ideology or conservative or liberal philosophy.
And while there are certainly still corporations that care about partnerships with labor and value the national interest along with their own interest—a goodly number of them right here in Detroit—that stance is more and more rare and it is hard to sustain in an environment that gives all the incentives to the most short-sighted players.
In a global economy where there are no rules, no standards of human rights, workers’ rights, or environmental and health protections, companies are encouraged to trek the world in search of cheaper and cheaper labor. That pits workers in our country against workers in other countries in a mindless race to the bottom that no one wins.
Since Congress granted China Permanent Normal Trade Relations and China joined the WTO, the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown by more than 20 percent—and that's just the beginning.
After 10 years of costly trial, NAFTA and the WTO have lowered incomes for workers in Mexico and Canada as well as workers in the United States and trade deficits with our NAFTA partners have resulted in a net loss of jobs. Now some in our corporate controlled Congress want to extend the damage to 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere through the Free Trade Area of the Americas—FTAA—which will have 10 times the impact of NAFTA—or, as one steelworker recently put it, we'll have "NAFTA on steroids...."
Clearly we're on a collision course with disaster, and the danger is compounded by the fact that we're replacing the high-wage, full-benefit jobs we're losing with low-wage, no benefit jobs that force families to depend on taxpayer assistance for medical care and rent subsidies.
Increasingly, employers are using the threat of moving jobs and plants overseas to scare workers who are trying to form and join unions, and in the process undermining the community standards set by union wages and benefits. And all the while, the Bush administration adds to the hurt by refusing altogether to address the obvious need for industrial and job-creating policies and programs...by repeatedly refusing to help people and our economy by extending unemployment benefits to workers whose assistance has run out, by refusing aid to states that are now experiencing their worst budget deficits since the War of 1812, by refusing to fund education and health care and urgently needed infrastructure improvements and by continuing to push for trade deals that have no protections for workers.
Now the President wants to make the jobs crisis worse by eliminating overtime pay and encouraging employers to pound more work out of current staff instead of hiring more people.
And the ultimate fallacy in all this is that the jobs we're losing and swapping down, and the families we're undermining are more than just the pillars of our economy and our communities. They are also the backbone of our capitalist system and the main contributors to the profits of the corporations that seem hell-bent on eroding the standard of living in this country.
If that happens, who will make the consumer purchases that account for three-quarters of the economic activity in our country? Who will invest the savings—individually and through worker pension funds—that enable companies to make capital and technological improvements? Indeed, who will pay the taxes that allow our governments to live up to our responsibilities not only here at home, but around the world?
Working families are no longer willing to wait patiently for answers or to trust markets and governments that are controlled by corporate money.
We charter corporations in this country so they can help raise living standards for the many, not just so they can line the pockets of the few...not so they can create the widest wage and wealth gap of any industrialized country in the world.
That’s why this fall, our 64 unions and their 13 million members will expand our work with a multi-part initiative to make the national jobs crisis the #1 issue not just for working Americans, but for our entire nation.
Our goals are:
To create new jobs and lift our economy with real national investments in our schools, highways, water and waste treatment and transportation facilities, in health care and in our energy systems.
To provide a level playing field for U.S. workers by stopping the proliferation of irresponsible trade agreements that lack workers' rights and environmental protections—we must say no to agreements that build global trade on abuses that hurt workers everywhere.
To reform U.S. tax and investment policies to reward companies that create good jobs here instead of those that move production offshore.
To help American firms compete by reining in the skyrocketing health insurance costs.
To create a national industrial policy guaranteeing that every decision made by our federal government contributes to the protection and creation of good jobs.
To provide substantial aid to our states to spur job and economic growth and halt the loss of health care, education and homeland security programs that America’s families depend upon.
To curb corporate abuses by reforming corporate governance and practices and by ending exorbitant rewards for CEOs who are poor stewards of their own companies and our society.
To raise job standards, not lower them, and defeat any effort to damage overtime standards. And to fully guarantee the rights of workers here in America and in other countries to lift themselves, their families and their communities up by joining and forming unions.
To move forward on these goals, we are launching a national effort to demand that policymakers at every level respond to the needs of working men and women and to make the jobs crisis the #1 issue in America. In city after city, we will take the message to the press, the public, our allies and elected officials: America must have good jobs, healthy communities and a voice for working families.
Community by community, we will be spearheading job-creating economic development, including a push for the Apollo Project for Energy Independence, which calls for creating 3.5 million new jobs by developing new energy systems, re-investing in current workers and plants and positioning American workers to compete in emerging industries of the future.
We will hold town hall meetings, rallies and marches in more than a dozen cities located in states where key congressional as well as the next presidential election will be decided—starting right here in Detroit on September 13th at a Detroit "Labor Fest" spearheaded by the UAW.
Our Industrial Union Council will take our message to Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Seattle and St. Louis.
We will bring unemployed and underemployed workers from every state together in an effort to focus the entire nation on the jobs crisis.
And then we will bring our mobilization to Miami in late November at the Free Trade Area of the America's Ministerial Conference, where our unions from the private as well as the public sector will gather to rally, march and present millions of "No to FTAA" ballots collected in the national tour demanding an end to the destruction of manufacturing jobs and a solution to our national jobs crisis.
Later this month, we will join with our affiliate unions in an Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride, with 60 buses crossing our country on behalf of workers’ rights and fairness for immigrant workers in the U.S.
But our battle won't stop there.
We're also forming a new organization called "Working America"—a new national union—to reach out to workers who are not members of unions and give them a way to join in the drive to create more good jobs and protect the ones we have. There are millions of working people who would like to be part of the AFL-CIO’s efforts for social justice and who want a voice to speak out and work to change the direction of this country. Working America will give them that chance. We will recruit for Working America in communities nationwide, including knocking on doors to build support for an even bigger push for legislation and policies which help working families. It will focus on state and local as well as national legislation.
And then we will draw from our frustration and our anger to organize the biggest political mobilization of working people in history to hold elected officials, including President Bush, accountable for their inaction on the trade and jobs crisis, and for the war the President has declared on working families and our unions since the day he took office.
Together, we intend to take our economy and our country off the low road and put them on a high road to a better future.
To a future where the workers who made our country great can have the good jobs they need and deserve...a future where corporations must compete on the basis of innovation and ingenuity, and not on the cheapness of the labor they can scavenge...
To a future where elected officials spend more time worrying about jobs and people than on propping up CEO salaries and corporate profits.
Where freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to join a union are valued higher than the freedom to make a buck...and where our government and our President devote our resources toward guaranteeing security and opportunity for workers, rather than giving away those resources to the rich.
Thank you and God bless every one of you and the great city of Detroit.
