by Adele Stan – Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog
At a White House event today featuring President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, AFT President Randi Weingarten represented labor leaders in joining university presidents and corporate executives in support of the presidential Better Buildings Challenge initiative.
President Obama announced that nearly $4 billion of investments have been committed already, including $2 billion by workers’ pension funds, CEOs, mayors and university presidents for energy-saving upgrades. The labor movement committed to work to invest $150 million in energy-efficient retrofit projects in the coming months.
The goal of the initiative, which builds on work begun by the AFL-CIO earlier this year with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), is to spur job creation by harnessing private sector investment in energy upgrades in commercial and industrial buildings.
Working with the AFT, a broad coalition of public-sector unions, and the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD), the AFL-CIO has been part of a CGI initiative for the retrofitting of union buildings, and has already exceeded its initial commitment of working with existing real estate-focused investment funds to invest between $10 million and $20 million of additional capital in energy-efficient retrofits of commercial, industrial, institutional and public buildings over the next six months.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who has been pushing for infrastructure and green-jobs investment at all levels, said in a statement:
The Better Buildings initiative has all the right components to make a real difference—it will create profitable investment opportunities for worker pension funds, create badly needed good jobs, increase America’s competitiveness around energy savings, and address the dangers of climate change.
Today’s action builds on 14 private sector commitments announced at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in June, including the labor movement’s aim to invest $10 billion in pension fund assets in job-creating infrastructure projects over the next five years.
The AFT has been retrofitting its headquarters building in Washington, D.C., to become LEED Silver certified, and the AFL-CIO has committed to a Better Buildings Challenge retrofit of its headquarters, expected to reduce energy consumption by 20 percent. As Weingarten explains:
We not only are asking others to commit to energy-saving retrofits, but we’re also doing it ourselves.
Photo by pdeonarain on Flickr, via Creative Commons.
Tags: Jobs, Richard Trumka
By Adele Stan – Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog
As the congressional Super Committee struggles to meet next week’s deadline for a plan to find $1.2 trillion in budget savings over the course of the next decade, some millionaires are targeting Capitol Hill with an unlikely message: Tax us more.
Earlier this week, we reported that Republican members of the committee proposed permanently extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, a move that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka dubbed “Robin Hood in reverse.”
At an ad hoc hearing on job creation, sponsored by the Congressional Progressive Caucus today, members of the group Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength testified to advocate for a more progressive tax structure that would ultimately tax them more. The alternative to continuing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will likely mean cuts in programs vital to the well-being of working people, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
After the hearing, the Patriotic Millionaires met with members of Congress, including members of the Super Committee, to press their case for making them and other wealthy Americans shore up the nation’s revenue stream through a fairer tax code. In a statement sent to reporters, Erica Payne, founder of the Patriotic Millionaires’ sponsoring group, the Agenda Project, said:
It will take all Patriotic Americans working together to fix the problems irresponsible politicians caused by cutting taxes for millionaires at the same time they put two wars on the nation’s credit card. We need to pay for the choices we make. These Patriotic Millionaires are willing to do that. On Wednesday, we will ask our elected officials if they are willing to do the same.
The hearing also featured testimony from economic experts Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future; Julianne Malveaux, Ph. D., president of Bennett College for Women; and Jeffrey Sachs, Ph.D., of Columbia University.
Another group of wealthy citizens is also targeting the Super Committee with a “tax me more” message. United for a Fair Economy (UFE) published an open letter to the committee, signed by more than 100 citizens with annual incomes of more than $200,000, urging:
The top marginal income tax rate should be raised to the pre-Bush level of 39.6%. Furthermore, we support the Fairness in Taxation Act (H.R 1124), which would create new tax brackets ranging from 45% for millionaires to 49% for billionaires; or alternatively, we support a 5.6% surtax on incomes over $1 million.
The letter’s signers include Microsoft Software Architect Arul Menezes, Grainpro President Phillippe Villers and Lamey-Wellehan President Jim Wellehan.
Warren Buffett, ranked by Fortune magazine as the third richest man on the planet, is also calling for greater taxes on the wealthy. According to Politico, that’s earned him the ire of his peers and their corporate mouthpieces, including the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which last month called for Buffett to release his tax returns. Buffett, Politico reports, said he would relsease them if Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire who owns both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, took the first step and put his returns in public view.
(By Adele Stan – Reposted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog)
Cuts instituted by Congress for the 2011 fiscal year eliminate some 370,000 jobs, while endangering the public and delaying necessary repairs and infrastructure work that will only be more expensive to complete in the future, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP).
In “Creating Unemployment: How Congressional Budget Decisions Are Putting Americans out of Work and Increasing the Risk of a Second Recession,” CAP Senior Fellow Scott Lilly writes that the loss of these jobs will have ripple effects throughout the economy.
The jobs losses that are a direct result of those actions will have a secondary impact on a wide array of businesses ranging from automobile producers to local restaurants and dry cleaning establishments, causing the disappearance of a significant number of additional jobs.
Already, the cuts to local law enforcement programs—which were cut by $2.5 billion compared to the previous year—are having a negative effect, Lilly reports. As an example, he turns to one California city:
Despite concessions by police officers in San Jose, California to accept a 10 percent pay cut, 66 police officers were forced to turn in their badges in June because of city budget problems. The cuts came in the midst of a recent upsurge in homicides and other serious crimes in the city
Further, with an average 19 percent unemployment rate for construction workers, Congress cut much-needed building repair projects.
Congress could choose to put Americans back to work in ways that will ensure the safety of taxpayers in their communities. Or it could continue down the path toward greater unemployment and imperiling the lives and health of the people who elected them.
As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said at this month’s Take Back the American Dream conference, right-wing politicians are intent on “ginning up this season’s version of ‘divide and conquer’ — set taxpayers against public employees.” If current trends prevail, taxpayers may soon have a taste of what life with too few public employees means for the country at large.
On Nov. 17, the union movement and our allies are rallying around a day of national action to demand “Jobs, Not Cuts.”
To download the ”Creating Unemployment: How Congressional Budget Decisions Are Putting Americans out of Work and Increasing the Risk of a Second Recession” in a PDF file, click here.
Tags: Jobs
