A new year is here. Usually this means new resolutions, new hopes, and new goals are being set. Some things, however, are hard to shake off. Take for example the great recession and jobs crisis. Today the official numbers came out, and they’re a sad reminder that 2010 is going to be a bumpy ride.
Lack of confidence…led employers to shed a more-than-expected 85,000 jobs in December… The unemployment rate held at 10 percent. The rate would have been higher if more people had been looking for work instead of leaving the labor force because they can’t find jobs.
The sharp drop in the work force – 661,000 fewer people – showed that more of the jobless are giving up on their search for work. Once people stop looking for jobs, they are no longer counted among the unemployed.
For reasons unknown to me, media outlets are writing about something relevant and covering one of the biggest issues affecting the nation – the lack of jobs. Not only are they covering jobs, they’re writing about the impact of the crisis on young workers!
On October 27th, more than 400 JwJ activists came from Detroit, Buffalo, Columbus, Indiana, DC, Chicago, and across Illinois to join the 5,000+ protestors at the American Bankers Association meeting in Chicago. Our delegation included workers, union members, students, and working people who are tired of watching Wall Street get in the way of meaningful reform on issues like Healthcare and financial reform. (Our coalitions in several other cities, including Orlando, FL and South Bend, IN, held solidarity actions.)
In Chicago we joined allied organizations including National People’s Action, SEIU, AFL-CIO, and many more to send a message to the bankers that we will no longer will be idle bystanders in the fight for the direction and future of our country.
Our message was summarized by new AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, “Business as usual is over. We are shutting you down now!”
One of the noteworthy pieces to lift up from this mobilization is that regular people and grassroots
From September 24th through October 1st, activists and workers in dozens of cities took to the streets as part of Jobs with Justice’s week of action demanding economic recovery for working America. We covered a lot of ground, connected some dots along the way, and observed the 1 year anniversary of Bush’s TARP (bailout) program the same way we welcomed it – on the streets and in opposition to corporate welfare.
With a national economy that continues to lose jobs, more and more homes being lost, and a debate around health care going nowhere unless we step up to the plate and mobilize for it, Jobs with Justice coalitions across the country brought diverse communities together to challenge those most responsible for the current crisis.
To say that the things that happened in Pittsburgh were, as President Obama said in the lead up to the G-20, “protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism” and that those protests were “not really going to make much of a difference” would be missing the real story about what took place in Pittsburgh and where “the movement” is going.
The G-20 Brought People Together – Connecting Pittsburgh to the World
Jobs with Justice worked with local and national groups to plan three events as part of activities inserting “People’s Voices” into the discussion during the G-20. Our coalition’s work focused on ensuring that there were spaces for movement convergence that allowed local, national, and
Carlos Jimenez is the Young Worker Project Coordinator for Jobs with Justice.
Over the last decade, the Bush administration pushed the agendas of the corporate and financial sectors so successfully that they are now deemed “too big to fail.” This trend recently brought our economy to the edge of a cliff until the public bailed out these institutions with our tax dollars. Now the financial “experts” say the economy is recovering, but things down here still look pretty bad to me. The Bush years had a terrible impact on working people – especially young workers.
Now here we are in the Obama era, and the many young people who made it possible continue to face an uphill battle on many issues central to their daily lives like wages and health care.
A new report by the AFL-CIO and Working America highlights a power base noticeably absent in national discussions about the economy in spite of their major contributions to the last election – young workers. Here are just some of the findings:
More than half of young workers earn less than $30,000 dollars! Seven out of ten do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses. More than
With the economy being what it is these days, one has to wonder, “What’s it going to take to turn this thing around”? Big Business is already trying to go back to “business as usual”, with a bottom-line focused on profits, and acting as if no economic crisis ever occurred. Sadly this continues to be done at the expense of their workers.
It’s easy to feel discouraged and hopeless in this situation as an individual, but if we are to overcome our immediate problems we need to get serious about building collective power to challenge the grip that corporations and banks have on Congress (which has been easy for all to see these days - just look at the healthcare debate.)
Thankfully it appears the labor movement is doing just that. There are
