Harold Meyerson writes about Working America in the Washington Post:
In an April speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Trumka affirmed that “working people are right to be mad at what has happened to our economy and our country.” Our political leaders, he continued, need to validate that anger — and remedy its causes — if they are to keep that anger from turning into racial, religious and homophobic hatred. The roots of that anger, and of the recession, lie in our creation of what Trumka termed a “low-wage, high consumption” economy in which the manufacturing of things has been supplanted by the manufacture of debt.
Working America’s canvassers hear that anger every day — sometimes directed at Wall Street, sometimes at the president, immigrants and other right-wing bogeymen. They grapple with it by highlighting job-creation programs (improving local roads) and anti-offshoring legislation that Democrats have backed and Republicans opposed. Next week, they’ll start campaigning for actual candidates, using these criteria.
Their message is surely the right one. The question is whether congressional Democrats and Obama in particular actually measure up to progressive-populist claims that labor makes for them. That they have passed landmark progressive legislation, and mitigated the scope of the recession, is beyond question. Hampered by Republican opposition, however, they clearly haven’t done enough to turn the economy around.
The Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, was supposed to help people keep their homes. Instead, it hurt people financially. Dave Dayen at Firedoglake has been covering this story in depth.
If you drive from Washington, DC to Brooklin, ME you certainly won’t feel like you’re driving through a country in which there are no potentially useful infrastructure projects that could be undertaken during the several-year period of elevated unemployment that we’re now projected to face. For example, there’s the bridge from New Hampshire to Maine: “The application says the bridge is ’structurally deficient’ and ‘functionally obsolete’ and has a weight limit of three tons.”
Things like the recent massive egg recall show how messed up our food system is in so many ways, hitting agricultural and food workers and the people who eat food. (Do you eat food? I do.)
TEXAS CITY, Tex. — While the world was focused on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a BP refinery here released huge amounts of toxic chemicals into the air that went unnoticed by residents until many saw their children come down with respiratory problems.
For 40 days after a piece of equipment critical to the refinery’s operation broke down, a total of 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including the carcinogen benzene, poured out of the refinery.
Rather than taking the costly step of shutting down the refinery to make repairs, the engineers at the plant diverted gases to a smokestack and tried to burn them off, but hundreds of thousands of pounds still escaped into the air, according to state environmental officials.
This plant has a history – in 2005, 15 people were killed and more than 170 injured in an explosion, and it’s been sued by the state for pollution violations.
Events like this show the interconnection of safety for workers on the job and families in their homes. Unsafe workplaces are also likely to be the ones that reach out and harm people for miles around by polluting the air and water; companies that profit by endangering their workers are likely to be the ones that don’t worry too much about the air their neighbors breathe.
To roads being turned to gravel, senior year of high school being made optional, public bus systems being shut down and libraries being closed, add another effect of state and municipal budget crises: firehouse brownouts.
Fire departments that can’t keep all their units open at any one time are instituting “rolling brownouts,” in which today the firehouse down the block from me might be closed and tomorrow it will be open while the one in your neighborhood across town will be closed. According to the New York Times, this is increasingly widespread—the article mentions Philadelphia, Baltimore, Sacramento, San Diego.
Firehouse closures don’t just affect the response time for fires. Increasingly, emergency medical response teams are part of fire departments, so people in cities with brownouts don’t just have to worry about facing a relatively rare fire. Much more common medical emergencies are suddenly a far graver concern: A heart attack, a fall down the stairs, being hit by a car. Or choking:
The risks of cutting fire service were driven home here last month when Bentley Do, a 2-year-old boy who was visiting relatives, somehow got his hands on a gum ball, put it in his mouth, started laughing and then began choking.
“It blocked the air hole,” said his uncle, Brian Do, who called 911 while other relatives frantically tried to dislodge the gum ball. “No air could flow in and out.”
It is only 600 steps from the front door of the neatly kept stucco home where the boy was staying to the nearest fire station, just down the block. But the station was empty that evening: its engine was in another part of town, on a call in an area usually covered by an engine that had been taken out of service as part of a brownout plan.
The police came to the home within five minutes and began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, officials said. But it took nine and a half minutes — almost twice the national goal of arriving within five minutes — for the fire engine, with a paramedic and more medical equipment, to get there. An ambulance came moments later and took Bentley to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Maybe that little boy would have died anyway. But wouldn’t you rather the question wasn’t out there? His family would, and they’re publicizing his story to draw attention to the problem.
State and municipal budget crises bring the overall economic crisis into sharp focus. If we can’t look at gravel roads and disappearing public transit and closed libraries and firehouses and see that something needs to be done, will Bentley Do’s story be enough? How much more of this will our government tune out before acting to end the crisis?
If you want to know how the health care reform law affects you, Healthcare.gov is one of the best places to go. And now they’ve made it possible to look up coverage options for your situation and your location. Check it out:
The song tells the story of a mill fire in which workers were killed because they were locked in. It’s a story that’s been lived out too many times—and, as Tim Eriksen and Riley Baugus noted while playing the song in a recent concert, though this song is historical, the practice of locking workers in is unfortunately not left far enough in the past. They pointed to the 1991 Hamlet chicken processing plant fire as an example, but in many more recent cases workers have reported being locked into other workplaces. Wal-Mart employees, for instance, were locked in overnight until very recently (assuming the store’s claims to have stopped the practice are truthful). They had one single fire door, but were forbidden to use it and in several cases, a needed trip to the hospital was delayed. And that fire door they were forbidden to use? Wal-Mart used to keep fire doors chained until an employee died because paramedics couldn’t get in.
And it’s a pretty safe bet that somewhere in America, there are still workers in a building where there’s no exit even in case of fire.
In case you were wondering (Congress, pundits, and other elites, I’m looking at you), this is not good.
Fully 500,000 Americans filed new claims for government unemployment insurance last week, the highest number in nine months and a sign of persistent trouble in the job market.
Everyone is familiar with the monthly national unemployment rate, which comes out on the first Friday of each month and now stands at 9.5 percent, according to the July numbers, the most recent available. That number gives us a monthly, detailed, deep look into unemployment in the U.S.
But the new weekly jobless claims number, which is released each Thursday by the Labor Department, gives us a faster, week-by-week snapshot of unemployment. And the picture is getting increasingly ugly.
Today’s number marked the third straight week of increase in new weekly jobless claims. That suggests that employers not only are not hiring, it suggests that they’re starting to lay off workers again, and that will start a whole cascade of problems for the U.S. economy and the politicians in Washington who face reelection this November.
It’s especially not good for California, Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Georgia.
And this is not enough of a silver lining to make this cloud do anything but pour on us.
The number of weekly unemployment claims is still far below the levels seen in early 2009, when initial claims were rolling in at a pace above 600,000 per week.
President Obama used today’s bad jobs data to urge Congress to restart the stalled small business jobs bill that he said would help small businesses with tax cuts and expense write-offs, and would help small banks lend to small businesses.
Working America has been focusing on unemployment a lot for more than a year now, from the Unemployment Lifeline to tele-town halls to field organizing to our steady stream of actions in favor of job creation and unemployment aid extensions. And now that we’re coming up on elections, it’s time to think about unemployment as an electoral issue.
Which we’re doing with a campaign, covered today by the Huffington Post, to get our unemployed members to vote, knowing where the candidates stand on this issue specifically.
The organization is starting with 100,000 of its own members who are currently out of work. But the list of contacts could wind up being “several hundred thousand” of the nearly 15 million unemployed, said Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America. In Ohio alone, Nussbaum said, Working America has a list of 38,000 unemployed workers who are registered to vote — a major bloc that could tip the scale of the governor’s race as well as elections to the House or the Senate.
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The effort, which is the first of its kind, is an ambitious effort to re-balance the political landscape away from pro-corporate, pro-business interests. But will the unemployed vote for the candidates Working America supports? Democrats, after all, have presided over the past year-and-a-half of an epic jobs crisis and it’s not unreasonable to expect the jobless won’t be drawn to their candidacies.
“Our experience as we go door to door is that people are looking for an explanation about why this is happening to them,” said Nussbaum when asked about a potential Democratic backlash. “The knee-jerk response to get mad at people that are in power is in the absence of having a better explanation. You can talk about who’s standing in the way of investing in jobs. The fact that corporations have way too much influence in government, that makes sense to people, and that when you compare voting records, when you look at for example a Republican bloc that has voted against every single jobs bill, including this unemployment extension, that’s information people take in and act on.”
There is no saying how many suicides the recession has caused.
During the Great Depression, the suicide rate increased about 20 percent, from 14 to 17 per 100,000 people. The Asian economic crisis in 1997 led to an estimated 10,400 additional suicides in Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, with suicides spiking more than 40 percent among some demographic groups. But such statistics can mislead, social scientists say. Joblessness does not cause suicide. Rather, it correlates: Depressed persons tend to lose their jobs due to poor work performance, and a few also commit suicide. Jobless people tend to turn to alcohol, worsening their depression, and increasing the chances that they harm themselves. Still, academic studies show that suicide rates tend to move with the unemployment rate. Researchers in New Zealand found that the unemployed were up to three times as likely to commit suicide, with middle-aged men the most likely.
So how many suicides are associated with the recession? Nobody knows, not yet. The statistics lag about three years, so the official Center for Disease Control numbers still predate the financial crisis. Right now, therefore, the reports remain anecdotal.
But looking at individual counties’ or cities’ data, there are ominous signs of a real spike. Some counties show no change. Others show dramatic climbs. In rural Elkhart County, Ind., where the unemployment rate is 13.7 percent, there were nearly 40 percent more suicides in 2009 than in a normal year. In Macomb County, Mich., where the unemployment rate is also 13.7 percent, an average of 81 people per year committed suicide between 1979 and 2006. That climbed to 104 in 2008 and to more than 180 in 2009.
The suicide prevention hotlines also show signs of stress. In Jan. 2007, as the recession started, there were 13,423 calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a nationwide toll-free hotline. A year later, there were 39,467. In Aug. 2009, the call volume peaked at 57,625. Last year, the government granted the group an extra $1 million to increase programs in places with high unemployment rates.
