This year, Labor Day will be marked by record unemployment rates paired with stagnant wages for working people, said Richard Trumka, who in 2009 became the youngest person ever to be elected AFL-CIO president. He spoke at the Christian Science Monitor Breakfast on August 25. “People have pretty much lost faith in Washington to solve their problems. They’re angry,” he added, but the solution to every one of our economic woes is simple: “Jobs, jobs, and more jobs.”
Trumka, who, in 1982, also made history by becoming the United Mine Workers’ youngest president, expressed frustration about the lack of leadership in job creation efforts: “We have an economy that has every sign of trailing off into what could be a second recession and we have no people talking about it.” With Republicans advocating for budget cuts and smaller government, Trumka said, we’re moving in the wrong direction. “The more that we move away from helping the economy grow…the more likely we are to go into a recession and the less likely we are to create jobs.”
Trumka argued that President Obama has been pandering to conservatives and Tea Party voices in Congress for too long, letting them steer the conversation around the economy. He brought up the recent debacle over raising the debt ceiling, decrying it as a product of obstinacy in Washington, a “politically manufactured fight… that is ultimately going to cost people a lot of jobs in the long run” A couple millions jobs at that, he added.
So how can Obama turn the conversation back to what’s going to help working people the most? To date, the labor advocate said, the president has concentrated on “little nibbly things” that may bring him short-term bipartisan approval: a percent or two in tax breaks, minor changes to patent controls, and infrastructure projects two or three years down the road. Instead, the president needs to talk about jobs with the same “scale and urgency” as he did during his health care and stimulus package fights. “He has to… focus all of his energy on bold solutions to the job crisis.”
Trumka at the Monitor Breakfast in 2009
“We have a country that’s crumbling,” said Trumka, and we’re not looking at the right places to shore it up. “We don’t have a short-term deficit crisis. It does not exist. We have a short-term job crisis. And if we fix the job crisis, the deficit crisis goes away.” Consumer spending accounts for about 72 percent of the country’s economic drivers, he explained, and in the current atmosphere of high unemployment and low wages, workers can no longer afford to spend.
Trumka talked about the necessity of sharing the burden, sharing the sacrifice among all sectors of the economy, but he hasn’t seen this yet. “CEOs have never done better… The very wealthy have never done better. When do they get to share in the sacrifice?”
In an environment where conservatives won’t budge from their pledge to keep taxes low and protect big business, Richard Trumka has one piece of advice for President Obama: “Do not look at what is possible” in the current atmosphere of political stubbornness. Instead lead boldly and “look at what is necessary.”
Watch AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka at the Monitor Breakfast on-demand at FORA.tv.