Labor

When Congress returns this week, one of the first items on its agenda will be to work on a broad bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), to extend jobless benefits and boost infrastructure programs in an effort to stimulate the economy. Lawmakers are seeking to raise tax revenues to pay for these jobs initiatives.

Read more...

The Department of Labor today reported a slight increase in jobs for the month of May.  While I am pleased with any job creation, it is disconcerting that 96 percent of the jobs created are temporary,

Today, as we honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, we must recommit ourselves to providing economic opportunity for our brave veterans once they return home.

Each day in Washington, I work to make sure that our troops and veterans receive all the benefits they have earned - from first-rate health care at the VA, to an affordable college education, low interest loans to buy a home and good opportunities for a new job when they've returned home to their families. It's the least we can do to repay the debt we owe them.

But these days, when our troops return from Iraq and Afghanistan, so often they are coming home to a country far different than the one they left. Many of the businesses they once knew and worked at are gone. Jobs have disappeared by the millions and are only very slowly starting to return. Read more...

Madam Speaker, the bill before us today, HR 4213, the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act, will help create jobs, support those without jobs, and lay the groundwork for new employment opportunities in the future.

The Joint Economic Committee, which I chair, has spent the first half of this year focused on identifying innovative, cost-effective approaches to job creation.

The JEC has uncovered new approaches to job creation and job training. But we’ve also heard that the most powerful action that can be taken to help the economy recover is to do something both basic and right – and that’s to extend unemployment insurance to those who need it.

Why is that? Because people who are unemployed rely on those benefits to make ends meet – to put food on the table, pay their rent or mortgage, and clothe their kids. A dollar spent on unemployment insurance “multiplies” into more than a dollar increase in economic output.

HR 4213 makes many key investments in our people and in our future. In addition to extending unemployment benefits and COBRA premium subsidies through the end of the year, the bill:

• Funds summer jobs for more than 300,000 young people;

• Continues the small business loan programs that eliminate fees for SBA’s 7(a) and 504 loan programs;

• Extends the R&D tax credit to encourage corporations to do the research today that will lead to high-paying jobs tomorrow.

There’s a lot that’s good in this bill. I want to focus a bit on the economic impact of extending unemployment benefits.

At the JEC, we’ve begun to look into the cost of inaction – the cost of not extending support to those who need it.

Of course, there is a human and moral cost. Without unemployment benefits, many families would suffer, go hungry, and even lose their homes.

But there’s another cost – a significant economic cost to the government of failing to extend unemployment benefits. Let me explain.

Nearly six percent of the unemployed are disabled workers and almost 290,000 unemployed disabled workers will exhaust their unemployment benefits by the end of 2010 if the program is not extended.

Without unemployment benefits to sustain them, the majority of these unemployed disabled workers will end their search for work and turn to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).

Once an individual begins to receive disability insurance, it is very unlikely he or she will return to the workforce.

A new report by the Joint Economic Committee – “Extending Unemployment Insurance Benefits: The Cost of Inaction for Disabled Workers,” shows that the lifetime cost of these disabled workers moving out of the labor force and onto SSDI is $24.2 billion.

And that number does not even factor in the lost wages and lost tax revenues that result from a disabled worker leaving the workforce for good.

By contrast, to keep these workers attached to the labor force by extending unemployment benefits and COBRA premium subsidies would cost $721.3 million in 2010.

The JEC analysis concludes that the federal government can save $23.5 billion by extending unemployment benefits and avoiding a lifetime of SSDI for currently-unemployed disabled workers.

Of course, this legislation does extend unemployment benefits and COBRA premium subsidies, while making many other sound investments.

There are many reasons to support HR 4213 -- the economic benefit to extending unemployment insurance is another good one.

I encourage you to vote for HR 4213.

BP, Massey Energy and Tesoro all have hauled out plaques celebrating safety achievements to deflect allegations of corporate recklessness in the aftermath of explosions in April that killed 47 of their workers.

Though each of these corporations accepted awards for safety statistics, not one has taken responsibility for workplace deaths. 

The disconnect between safety awards and dead workers has enabled these corporations to characterize the explosions as accidents, random events for which no one really is to blame, certainly not corporate officials who control conditions in workplaces. That’s why these pseudo-safety awards are so destructive. Read more...

“Employee misclassification” may sound like an arcane accounting snafu that only people who squint at ledger books all day would be interested in.

In reality, however, it is an enormous economic and social problem.

Misclassifying workers as independent contractors when they are in fact employees strips them of rights and protections they deserve, undermines fair competition and leaves taxpayers holding the bag.

In 2006, the Governmental Accountability Office estimated that more than 10 million workers were misclassified. These workers, who are really employees, have been counted as independent contractors because their employers want to avoid the costs associated with employees, such as Social Security and Medicare payments, vacation, sick leave, and pensions.

Airline and railroad employees will soon be forced into joining labor unions thanks to a shocking decision by the National Mediation Board (NMB).  The decision was conveniently announced the same day President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court so it received much less media coverage than it might have otherwise.

As another payback to its political benefactors in Big Labor, the Obama Administration has made radical changes to union-organizing rules, which govern both aviation and railway workplaces and have been in place for nearly a century.

By changing these long established rules that were operational during both Republican and Democratic administrations, President Obama is forcing workers into unions by allowing the will of a small group of employees to dictate the fate of the entire workforce.

The rules, governed by the NMB, create a situation where workers will be unionized if only a majority of those workers actually voting cast a ballot in favor of unionization.

Corporate CEOs, union-busting lawyers, and conservative politicians who pander to the rich condemned a National Mediation Board (NMB) Ruling this week.

They complained that the NMB gave railway and airline workers the ability to obtain collective bargaining rights through majority-rule elections. That’s the type of balloting that occurs under universal democratic rules. Everyone qualified to vote is invited to participate, and the outcome is determined by the majority of those who cast ballots.

The anti-worker-rights groups wanted the NMB to retain a different kind of election – one that requires the winner to receive votes from the majority of all of those qualified to participate -- essentially, a supermajority.  Read more...

The governors of the Gulf Coast states, all Republicans, asked the federal government for help dealing with the BP oil spill -- yeah, the government, the very organization that their hero and mentor Ronald Reagan described as “the problem,” not the solution. “The problem” must deal with our oil problem, those Republicans told President Obama.

The President sent the help they requested, but at the same time, Republican mouthpieces like House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence accused the administration of responding too slowly to the spill. Republicans believe government should be shrunk so small it can be downed in a bathtub, that government should get out of the way and allow private enterprise to work.  But, simultaneously, they want government to clean up a catastrophe created by private industry. Read more...

The U.S. Labor Department today reported that the national unemployment rate has remained near 10 percent.  This is far from the 8 percent unemployment rate that President Barack Obama promised when he promoted his trillion-dollar, big-government stimulus last February.   Since the big government stimulus has failed to live up to its many promises, it’s time to incentivize growth in the private sector.  As Michael Boskin wrote in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, “President Obama has put tax reform on the agenda, but surprisingly little attention is being paid to fixing the most growth-inhibiting, anticompetitive tax of all: the corporate income tax.  Reducing or eliminating the corporate tax would curtail numerous wasteful tax distortions, boost growth in both the short and long run, increase America's global competitiveness, and raise future wages.” Read more...