Labor & Employment Law

Some Real Questions for Chamber?s ?Jobs Summit?

By James Parks

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicks off its ?Jobs for America: Summit 2010? this afternoon in Washington, D.C., the question workers most want participants to answer is: Will the Chamber help create good jobs at home or will it just keep backing corporations who chase the bottom line by sending jobs overseas?

Rather than straight talk about how corporate greed created the jobs crisis, Chamber leaders are expected to raise the same tired blather that too much regulation is strangling business. (Let’s see. There was SO much regulation of the financial industry in recent years that Big Banks didn’t run wild and wreck the economy. Oh, wait….)

Here are three questions the AFL-CIO and working people would like to ask the Chamber:

1. Big corporations and Wall Street had their way for eight years under the Bush administration and we’re just beginning to undo the damage. Which corporation is the model to show there is too much government regulation? The Wall Street firms that tanked the economy? Massey Energy mining, whose long record of safety violations led to miners being killed? BP, whose long record of violations led to workers being killed and is still destroying the Gulf of Mexico? 

2.  Why are there no unemployed workers at your event? Millions of Americans are out of work and have lost their benefits. But according to the agenda, there is not a single one of them represented at this event. This shows the real purpose of their event.  Not to create jobs for people, but to keep the status quo for Big Business and their profits.

3.  If you think there’s too much government regulation, can we continue to expect statements from Chamber President Tom Donohue that taxpayers should be responsible for corporate bad actions like he said about BP?

 In case you hadn?t heard, Donohue has said taxpayers should shoulder more of the burden of the cleanup of the Gulf after the BP oil spill. Even the Gulf Coast chambers of commerce are backing away from that statement.

“We agree to disagree,” Dawn Moliterno, president of the Walton Area (Fla.) Chamber of Commerce, told the Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger:

To say that we as taxpayers should spend more is just wrong.

Actually, though, there are some things that workers and the Chamber do agree on. At the Aspen Institute?s Ideas Festival last week, during a panel discussion that included AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Donohue said he and the Chamber ?are in absolute agreement? with the federation?s call for long-term investment in our infrastructure. He also said he supports the extension of unemployment benefits, which some of his Republican allies in Congress are blocking.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on July 14, 2010 (boomark / email).