Labor & Employment Law

Trumka: Building ?Real? Things?Not Financial Fantasies?Creates Jobs

By Mike Hall

America’s working families “need an economy that’s based on building?not bubbles,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told the 3,000 union activists and leaders at the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department’s (BCTD’s) legislative conference this morning.

Trumka, speaking as the conference wrapped up its third and final day in Washington, D.C., said that while President Obama’s economic recovery program has created or saved 2 million jobs and put a dent in the nation’s hole in our labor market, “It’s not enough.”

As the economy tanked during the recession that started in 2007 under George W. Bush’s watch, construction work on power plants, office buildings and factories stopped and are still stalled. Trumka said the fingerprints of Wall Street’s greed are all over the economic crime scene.

For eight years or more, people on Wall Street who couldn’t or wouldn’t tell you what they did all day if their lives depended on it made their livings destroying other people’s lives and livelihoods. They gambled our money on phony financial instruments like subprime mortgages and derivatives and choked off the credit the construction industry depended on.

Now is the time, he said, “to go back to the basics, to making money by making things?real things?not financial fantasies.”

Cars, computers and construction, making things like roads, bridges, water infrastructure, schools, making new sources of clean energy and factories?so our brothers and sisters can make the steel, concrete and other products used in construction. We need an economy that’s based on building?not bubbles.

Trumka outlined the AFL-CIO’s five-point program to create jobs and put Americans back to work and also called for strong and tough financial reform legislation to rein in the actions by Wall Street and the Big Banks that trashed the economy.

Looking ahead to the fall elections, Trumka said, “It’s no secret most Americans are angry.” But that anger, he said, needs to be directed at Wall Street and the Big Banks and “their hired hands in Washington.” All of us working family voters need to

vent our rage at the wrecking crew who got us into this mess, not the cleanup crew who’s working overtime to get us out. And we’ll be damned if we let them turn our righteous anger into ugly outbursts of hatred against the most vulnerable among us.

Working Americans are smarter than that, we are wiser than that, and we are better than that. We don’t believe in burning bridges. We believe in building bridges?to our fellow citizens, our finest ideals, and our common future.

Yesterday, the delegates hit Capitol Hill where they lobbied their lawmakers on key construction trade legislative issues, including:

• Employers’ misclassifying workers as independent contractors to avoid wage and hour and other employment and tax laws;
• Energy policy, climate change and green jobs;
• Project Labor Agreements that ensure fair wages and benefits and on-time completion of local, state and federal construction projects;
• The 9/11 Heath and Compensation Act to provide medical monitoring and treatment for first responders and recovery workers at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center attacks.

Also yesterday, delegates gave a hero’s welcome to Robin De Haven, a Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) Local 1778 member. In February, De Haven’s fast action helped save five people trapped in an Austin, Texas, office building after a man with a vendetta against the Internal Revenue Service, which had offices in the building, crashed his fuel-laden plane into the building.

De Haven is a graduate of the Helmets to Hardhats program that helps match vets and soon-to-be vets with apprenticeship and training programs offered by the 15 unions in the BCTD.

Click here for a video report on yesterday’s proceedings.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on April 21, 2010 (boomark / email).