Unpopular as they were with the public, had the federal government not financially rescued both the nation’s big banks and then two of the Detroit Three automakers, the U.S. would have descended into another Great Depression, Vice President Joe Biden says.
In a long speech March 1 to the AFL-CIO Executive Council, meeting in Orlando, Fla., Biden added that without those two moves, the banks would have closed, “we would have been in a flat-out Depression and millions more would be without jobs.” That includes another million people in manufacturing: Auto workers and workers whose products the industry uses.
“And we wouldn’t have had any shot” at other measures to help restore the middle class, including revising the nation’s health care system, naming new National Labor Relations Board members, labor law reform, and energy efficiency legislation, the vice president stated.
Biden was interrupted several times by applause from the union leaders and invited guests, but took no questions after the address. He only briefly mentioned labor’s top legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act, designed to help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining.
That measure, like the health care bill, the cap-and-trade energy plan and even an NLRB nomination, is marooned on Capitol Hill by Senate GOP filibusters, frustrating Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration, union leaders, and voters.
Biden acknowledged that frustration in his speech, saying a jobless single mother sitting at home is not cheered by economic indicators such as GOP growth, but is angry instead that yet another GOP blockade caused jobless benefits to temporarily expire for 6 million people.
“You’re having a hard time explaining to them” -- workers, employed and unemployed --“why these guys you elected aren’t doing things for you,’ Biden said. “The Great Recession…has put people who were already losing ground, in the 80s, the 90s and the first seven years of this century, in even worse” condition.
“There are millions of people who think we just don’t get it,” Biden said of both politicians and union leaders. :”This president gets it,” he declared.
But Biden also pleaded for time, saying “not even the intervention of God Almighty could restore” the 8.5 million U.S. jobs lost since the start of the crash, under GOP President George W. Bush, in Dec. 2007. The Bush Crash has also seen both the jobless rate and the number of unemployed more than double, to 9.7% and 14.8 million, respectively.
And Biden warned that in a recession, it takes 18 months before job creation catches up to other positive economic statistics, such as growth in output. That’s because “businesses found they can produce more with less people,” he explained.
Nevertheless, the vice president predicted that starting in spring, the economy would create 95,000-100,000 jobs monthly, “but it’s not enough.” Economists say you need to create 200,000 jobs monthly just to employ new entrants to the labor market.
In the meantime, Biden offered examples of how the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus law helped workers. Earlier, AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka said the law was one-third of what it should have been. Going union by union, Biden ticked off a long list of projects started or aided by the law, including:
* 12,000 transportation construction projects, creating 262,000 jobs “at the prevailing wage and with Davis-Bacon” to ensure workers’ wages are not undercut by unscrupulous contractors. Construction unemployment is more than 20%.
* 300,000 jobs preserved in teaching and allied aides in U.S. schools.
* $800 million to be invested in clean coal technology. “It’s a start, Cecil,” he told Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts, whose union has been hard hit by coal’s contribution to climate problems.
* $8 billion to be invested in broadband technology, rewiring the country and bringing thousands of Communications Workers jobs. Another $8 billion for mass transit and for Amtrak, preserving jobs for Amalgamated Transit Union, Transport Workers Union and rail union members, while starting to rehabilitate Amtrak.
* Billions of dollars to state and local governments to preserve jobs and services. Biden quoted Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa., as saying that without the aid from the stimulus law, he would have had to fire 37,000 people -- half the state’s workforce.
“I’m an optimist and you should be, too,” Biden said. “We’ll reconstitute the (older) industries while at the same time claiming a stake in the new world economy… The list goes on,” Biden said, of jobs in the “new economy” the Obama administration is trying to help construct. And in his only mention of the Employee Free Choice Act, he told the union leaders: “That’s where you’ll have to organize,” once it is passed.