New Orleans, LAIn today's economy, in the face of spiking unemployment and one of the largest, most deceit-driven corporate failures in American history, working families are not a priority. Unless our unions drive an agenda to create and maintain good jobs, to protect and strengthen retirement security, health care and education and to hold corporations accountable, these crucial issues will not be moved to the forefront in America. That's why we must and will mobilize a massive grassroots legislative and political program around a working families agenda.
In the past year, 1.4 million jobs were lost—1.2 million of them in manufacturing. Health care coverage dropped, with 2 million more joining the ranks of the unemployed since last March. The nation's wage and wealth gap widened. While those at the top got richer - and will grow richer still as last year's back-loaded millionaire tax cut phases in - many workers saw their retirement savings devastated. The most vulnerable among us - immigrants, the unemployed, low-wage earners and recent workforce entrants from the welfare rolls - face economic hardship and uncertainty at the very moment the nation's safety net is in tatters.
That working families are relegated to the bottom rung is not because of benign intent, nor is it the product of war or recession or other forces beyond the control of the nation's policymakers. It is the predictable result of clear, specific and deliberate choices and priorities that elevate the interests of the well-to-do and major corporations over working families and those who most need to turn to government during hardship.
- Even after a year in which the Administration's most prominent domestic achievement was a break-the-bank tax cut that conferred almost 60% of its benefit on the top 10% of tax payers, more than one third on the top 1%, but only 15% on the bottom 60% of taxpayers, the President and many in Congress refuse to extend economic relief to the unemployed unless it is coupled with whopping corporate tax breaks and accelerated implementation of last year's cuts. And the President's proposed FY 2003 budget cuts deeply into job training, safety and health, and labor standards programs while increasing funding and staff for programs that investigate and prosecute unions.
- Even after September 11th, when everyday workers were celebrated as heroes, lip service substituted for real relief or respect for working families. Congress and the President bailed out the airline industry, but they refused to extend any help to tens of thousands of airline workers whose lives and livelihoods changed overnight.
- Even after the nation's long-term budget surpluses plunged more than $4 trillion in one year, forcing the government to dip into the Social Security trust fund and compromising our ability to meet critical needs, the President renewed his call for Social Security private accounts, ignoring the great costs and risks associated with such a wrenching and radical change.
- Even in the face of sharp hikes in health care premiums, fueled largely by out-of-control prescription drug costs, the President abandoned any meaningful attempt at prescription drug coverage and proposes instead a piecemeal, inadequately funded plan that would exclude many seniors and provide uncertain benefits to the rest. And despite the sharp rise in the numbers of the uninsured, the Administration is proposing only expansion of Medical Savings Accounts and tax credits to purchase coverage in the private insurance market - approaches that will do little, if anything, to expand health care coverage or to cap the rise in health care costs.
- Even though the Labor Department's own data show that trade-related job losses have grown substantially over the past 18 months, the President pushed through fast track trade authority that protects corporate interests but not workers' rights.
- And even though the federal minimum wage is once again teetering at a 40-year low, worth more than $2 less than in 1968, the Labor Department has recently invited input from employers on ways to make it even easier to hire full-time students at less than the minimum wage.
As the only voice for America's working families, the union movement's responsibility is clear and our duty certain: we cannot allow greed to grow or inequality to fester. We cannot allow the interests of the best connected and most privileged among us to dictate policies that have such profound effects on the rest of us. Instead, we must fight for an agenda that gives priority to working men and women and our families - the families who are America's backbone. In a year when the political stakes are great, we must mobilize working families nationwide as never before around a legislative and political agenda for good jobs, economic security for our families and corporate accountability.
Our AFL-CIO Agenda for All America
1. Invest in America and create good jobs here for America's working families. Too many of our schools, roads and bridges, as well as our airports, railroads, water, sewage, public health and energy systems, are in terrible shape. Too many women and men work hard every day, but receive only poverty wages regardless of how much we actually need and value their work. And too many others are trapped in dead-end jobs, denied the opportunity to obtain education and training that would help them advance. We must invest more in our country and the men and women who make our country strong. That means putting more federal and state money into rebuilding America, raising a federal minimum wage that has been stagnant for six long years, and making training and career ladders available to all workers.
2. Keep good jobs and level the playing field. In the past year alone, more than one million manufacturing jobs have fallen victim to flawed trade policies and inadequate protections for workers in the global economy. We must develop an effective strategy and program for stopping the export of good jobs and reindustrializing the U.S. economy. We must change tax laws that create incentives for destroying jobs, and negotiate trade agreements that protect workers in the global economy as diligently as they protect corporations. We must stop the erosion of basic workers' rights and wage and hour laws here at home. We must redouble our efforts to realize the nearly 40-year old promise of equal pay for equal work, to inhibit contracting-out schemes and temporary employment that all too often turn decent jobs into marginal employment, and to rein in the privatization of public services, which often reduces the quality of service delivery and eliminates middle-class jobs, especially for women and minority workers.
3. Strengthen and protect retirement security. Making sure there are no more Enrons is an important part of our agenda. But we will also address the bigger problem—employer-provided pensions have deteriorated and declined in the last 20 years, seriously weakening the three-legged stool of retirement protection that includes pensions, private savings and Social Security. And attacks on Social Security—our nation's most successful family protection program—have made a serious situation even more dangerous. We must shore up Social Security, not tear it down, and resist the efforts of the Bush Administration to replace guaranteed benefits with uninsured individual accounts like those held by the Enron employees.
4. Make high quality, affordable health care available to all. Health costs are out of control again. Fewer jobs come with health insurance, workers are expected to pay more for on-the-job coverage, and families are losing health insurance protections. Prescription drugs have become increasingly unaffordable, especially for seniors. Today, no less than ten years ago, ever declining access to affordable and high quality health care is a crisis of grave dimensions for millions of many working families - and a crisis of national proportions for us all. We will press forward in a campaign to win expansion of successful programs that provide care to uninsured children and to extend coverage to their parents, to make prescription drug coverage a guaranteed benefit under Medicare, and to enact an HMO patients' bill of rights.
5. Hold corporations strictly accountable. What's good for corporate America should be good for America, not just for a select few at the top. We will work to end the insider deals and untangle the conflicts of interest that allow greed to trump honesty and decency in our corporate culture. And we will insist on respect for the rights of ALL workers, including the right to make a free choice to join with others in a union.
6. Improve and protect public education. A good education is a basic right of all in America, and not just a privileged few. Our public schools and colleges are the only way we can guarantee that right for all individuals. And a good, solid system of universal public education is the building block of our democracy, and our best insurance policy against becoming a deeply divided society. We will fight to improve our nation's public schools, to protect them from the draining effects of voucher schemes, and to recruit and train better teachers and compensate them more fairly.
Ours is an important and ambitious agenda, but we believe that working families expect - and deserve - no less. That's why we must do all we can in this vital election year to make the AFL-CIO Agenda for All America real. In 2002, we must educate and mobilize our members around good jobs, strong families and corporate accountability in legislation and politics. In races at every level, from city council to governor to the U.S. Senate, we will ask candidates: What about working families? Are you looking out for average working families or corporate special interests? Whose side are you on? We will organize working men and women to ask those questions - and to get them answered. And in the end, if we cannot count on current officeholders to change the rules and put working families first, we must change the officeholders.