Main Street

Some Fervent Hopes for the Jobs Summit

As President Obama prepares to convene the White House Jobs Summit today, more than 15 million Americans are unemployed. Millions more are underemployed or working at jobs with lower pay. The economy, with the help of the Administration’s Recovery Act, has been pulled back from the brink of a full-blown Depression, but the depth of structural damage done to the real economy by Wall Street’s Great Recession has only created the false dawn of a so-called jobless recovery.

Clearly more must be done. A lot more. I hope that the Jobs Summit delivers on a real commitment to doing what’s needed to strengthen and extend jobless aid while investing in large-scale public and private job-creation to get Americans back to work.

Recently the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) sponsored a Spotlight on Jobs session which pulled together leading labor, progressive and civil rights organizations. Out of that meeting emerged a five point plan endorsed by EPI, the AFL-CIO, NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Council of La Raza and the Center for Community Change:

America Needs Jobs Now

No one needs to tell America’s families that unemployment and underemployment are at crisis levels. We need jobs—and we need them now.

Wall Street has gotten its bailouts. Now it’s time for Main Street to get some immediate help.

The AFL-CIO is calling on Congress and the Obama administration to take five steps now to care for the jobless and put America back to work.

1. Extend the lifeline for jobless workers. Unless Congress acts now, supplemental unemployment benefits, additional food assistance and expansion of COBRA health care benefits will expire at the end of the year. They must be extended for another 12 months to prevent working families from bankruptcy, home foreclosure and loss of health care. Extending benefits also will boost personal spending and create jobs throughout the economy.

2. Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems. America still has at least $3 trillion in unmet infrastructure needs. We should put people to work to fix our nation’s broken-down school buildings and invest in transportation, green technology, energy efficiency and more.

3. Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services. State and local governments and school districts have a $178 billion budget shortfall this year alone—while the recession creates greater need for their services. States and communities must get help to maintain critical frontline services, prevent massive job cuts and avoid deep damage to education just when our children need it most.

4. Fund jobs in our communities. While workers go without jobs, important work is left undone in our communities. We should put people to work restoring our environment, providing child care and tutoring, cleaning up abandoned houses and more. These are not replacements for existing public jobs. They must pay competitive wages and should target distressed communities.

5. Put TARP funds to work for Main Street.The bank bailout helped Wall Street, not Main Street. We should put some of the billions of dollars in leftover Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to work creating jobs by enabling community banks to lend money to small- and medium-size businesses. If small businesses can get credit, they will create jobs.

America’s jobs situation would be even more dire without the economic stimulus program President Obama and Congress enacted, which has saved or created 1 million jobs. But the depth of this crisis demands that we do more—and that we do it now, before more people lose their jobs, their homes, their health care and their hope.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will be taking this plan to today’s White House Jobs Summit. It is my fervent hope that a consensus of those in attendance develops rapidly around this approach, and that the coalition supporting such an effort continues to build and expand coming out of this Jobs Summit.

I hope the Administration and Congress proceed to construct policies to implement these plans and do so with the urgency required to meet the massive challenge of joblessness in our country.

I hope that this Jobs Summit represents a genuine effort to engage the voices on Main Street in helping to shape economic policy. I hope that this Jobs Summit marks a real move to listen to those economists and policy experts who have had it right all along — people at today’s Summit such as Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

And while the cynics and the Wall Street pundits try to paint President Obama’s Jobs Summit as a mere “PR” move, I fervently hope that those in attendance and the President himself prove them wrong.

Tags: jobs, Jobs Summit, unemployment