Trumka Attacks the Banks with Speeches;
What’s His Plan to ‘Make Wall Street Pay’?

“Wall Street executives destroyed 11 million jobs with their risky practices and now they must pay to create new jobs and not be allowed to return to business as usual,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said during an interview with MSNBC.

Trumka also boasted that the AFL-CIO’s unprecedented two weeks’ campaign under the slogan, ”Decent Jobs Now!—Make Wall Street Pay!,” conducted 200 events in front of major U.S. banks, and he vowed to revisit Wall Street April 29 with “10 to 12,000 of my friends to take the message straight to executives.”

In addition to continuing his verbal assaults on the greedy bankers and financiers, what else does Brother Trumka propose to “Make Wall Street Pay!”? Thus far, he has been silent about the issue. He has not raised the question of whether millions of workers should be compensated for the loss of their jobs and a part of their retirement income.

Critics say that Trumka seems content to let the Wall Street crowd off the hook, while he uses his speeches to polish his reputation as a fighter for working people. At his MSNBC interview, Trumka said that “you [Wall Street] destroyed the jobs, now you should pay to create the jobs.” Do you think Wall Street was taking him seriously? He also wants the big banks not to return to their ”business as usual” practices. Who is going to stop them?

The AFL-CIO deserves credit for mobilizing 80 or more of its affiliates in cities and towns across the country to participate in its campaign for jobs and justice. If “Make Wall Street Pay!” is to have any meaning, there must be forceful action behind that slogan.

How Many of Those 11 Million Lost Jobs Can Be Regained?

Trumka said the country needs an aggressive jobs program, and the “AFL-CIO’s main focus will be on creating jobs.” Realistically, the labor federation cannot create jobs. The major sources of jobs are the government and private industry.

There are two ways by which organized labor can save a large number of jobs. One way is to clamp down on corporate outsourcing. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing and financial services jobs have gone to China, India, Malaysia, Mexico and other countries, where labor is cheap and plentiful. The latest is Whirlpool’s exodus to Mexico, which unions made no serious effort to stop.

Through boycotts and other measures, unions can make it so very expensive to outsource their production needs that companies will think twice before attempting to do so.

A second way is to challenge massive layoffs by any company. At a time when companies are recovering from the recession, unions must insist on a moratorium on layoffs. Companies should be compelled to explain the reasons for the layoffs and. demonstrate they have considered other alternatives.

Creating government-funded jobs on a scale that is needed—like the New Deal works projects of the 1930’s—would require an enormous investment that would, at least in the short term, add countless billions to the national debt. The problem is that both the Congress and the White House are focused on reducing the debt and are in no mood to finance a gigantic job-creating plan, especially with signs that the economy is recovering.

The task facing the AFL-CIO and Change to Win is to convince Congress that an investment in jobs for the unemployed is a sensible and humane policy that will stimulate the economy, because the new jobholders would spend their wages mostly on necessities. They would be taxpayers contributing to the government’s revenue instead of living off unemployment benefits. It would help to restore their self-respect.

The alternative—abandoning millions of working families to a life of chronic poverty—is immoral and totally unacceptable.—Harry Kelber

LaborTalk (54) will be posted here on Thursday, April 8, 2010 and on our two web sites: www.laboreducator.org and www.laborsvoiceforchange.org.