A CRUCIAL YEAR FOR LABOR

By Edward Gorham

President

Maine AFL-CIO
 

     Every election year as Labor’s COPE Convention meets I point out the importance of the elections to Maine workers and working families. This year is no exception; however, this is, without doubt, the most crucial election year for labor in more than a half century.

            From his first days in office, President George W. Bush has assailed the interests of workers and their families. The result is a long and sobering record of Bush administration attacks on workers’ jobs, health, safety, civil rights and more.

New President Essential

            Of the utmost concern to Maine workers and working families is the necessity to elect John Kerry as President and put an end to the failed presidency of George Bush.

            One can sum up the nearly four years of the Bush administration in just a few words - he has pulled the rug out from under America's working people and rolled out a red carpet for the wealthy and for giant corporations.

            The loss of millions of jobs, including 2.7 million in the industrial sector, has given Bush the worst employment track record of any president since Herbert Hoover.

Massive Job Loss

            This massive job loss is a huge problem not only for the nation but also for Maine.

            Maine has been hit harder in this area than any other state. From July 2000 until August 2003, Maine lost 17,800 manufacturing jobs. This is a 22.1 percent manufacturing job loss – a greater percentage loss than any other state in the nation.

The entire New England region has been equally hard hit. Over the last two years there has been a steep decline in New England employment – a 3 percent reduction in the number of jobs, including 150,000 jobs lost in manufacturing alone.

Plants Still Closing

This “disastrous erosion” of manufacturing jobs continues even now and includes the continued closing of Maine paper mills and other manufacturing plants which has gone on for several years.

We all know what happened to our formerly prosperous shoe and textile industries in the last four or five decades and the closings in these and similar industries have not ended.

For the same money that Bush spent on millionaire tax breaks, he could have stimulated the economy and created jobs by building roads and schools, helped provide much-needed health care, sent urgently needed aid to the states and given tax breaks to the low and middle-income workers who need it and will spend it to get the economy moving.

Millions Unemployed

As might be expected fewer jobs means more unemployment and the Bush Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress flatly refuses to help those workers in need.

In January an estimated record high of 375,000 jobless workers exhausted their unemployment benefits. An estimated 2 million such workers will find themselves facing the same economic disaster during the first six months of this year.

    An estimated 6,000 or more of these workers exhausting such benefits before July are in Maine.

    The current rosy predictions ignore the hard reality facing unemployed working families in Maine and the nation. The fact is that in no other six month period for which data is available have so many workers exhausted their regular unemployment benefits without being able to receive additional assistance.

Surveys show that more than half of these workers and working families will have to cut back on food and more than half will postpone medical and/or dental treatment.

Bush Anti-Union

Bush and his administration have rightly been called the most anti-union administration in recent history. Bush has done everything in his power to weaken and destroy unions and take away the right of workers to seek better pay and safe working conditions through collective bargaining.

Forty million Americans say they would form a union tomorrow, but far too few will get a chance to do so.  Cornell University research indicates that 95% of private-sector employers fight union organizing, some using illegal tactics such as threatening to shut down if workers choose a union or firing union supporters. The federal government, through a series of Bush-supported actions and endless delays, fosters such illegal union busting tactics.

Being jobless for a significant period quickly puts a working family on the road to poverty. Total unemployment is extremely discouraging. Also the total time workers are out of work when they lose a job is at a very high level. The average length of unemployment has risen to 19 weeks – the highest level in 20 years.

We have heard in the last few months about “new jobs” being created at the rate of 200,000 to 300,000 a month and we are told that this signals a big turnaround in the nation’s economic growth.

New Jobs – Poor Jobs

What the Bush Administration does not mention is that millions of unemployed who have given up looking for work are simply not counted as unemployed. They do not mention that 82% of these “new jobs” are low paying service industry jobs with few benefits. And they do not mention that just to stay even with the growth of the size of the workforce, due to population increase, would require 150,000 new jobs a month.

The nation has been hard hit by the Bush mis-administration and so has Maine.

The so called “recovery” Bush is bragging about is a business recovery – not a recovery for working Americans. Nine million workers are still looking for work, more than in any other similar recovery in more than 50 years. Rebounding corporate profits are not being shared with workers.

Workers Get Less

  In the average recovery over the last 50 years employees got 61 percent of corporate income growth and corporations 26 percent. In this recovery the figures are reversed. Corporations are getting a lion’s share of the income growth and only 29 percent is going to workers.

Massive and persistent job losses, a shocking failure to help the unemployed despite billions in available, dedicated unemployment funds, elimination of overtime pay for millions of workers, union busting in both the private and public sectors, reductions in health care and veterans’ benefits, refusal to support a fair increase in the minimum wage, cuts in job training funding , blocking and weakening of workplace safety laws and standards, denial of bargaining rights – these are only a few of the anti-worker, anti-labor anti-middle class actions of Bush and the Bush Administration.

The Truth About Bush

Labor activists who have closely followed the actions of Bush for more than three years have no doubt about the need to replace him as President. However, for any voters still in doubt about the literally hundreds of destructive actions, lies and misleading statements of the current Administration, the web site of the Maine AFL-CIO (www.maineaflcio.org) provides links to the complete “Bush Watch” feature of the national AFL-CIO and to a well researched and searchable data base of such lies and statements – both in the area of labor issues and many other social and civil rights areas as well. Mass media continues to distort the image but the truth about Bush is readily available to all.

Can any worker or any working family in Maine or the nation doubt that we need a change? There can be no doubt that this is a crucial year for labor and that we must go all out to assure the election of John Kerry as President and the re-election of outstanding friends of Labor such as First District Congressman Tom Allen and Second District Congressman Mike Michaud – along with Maine legislators who recognize the needs and problems of working families and who will work and fight to help us meet those needs.

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