Good union jobs ahead under plan
by Richard Trumka
As President Joe Biden addressed a joint session of Congress recently, he highlighted a fundamental truth about his American Jobs Plan. For once, our leaders aren’t pushing another tax break for the elite, bailing out the ultra-wealthy or preaching the false gospel of trickle-down economics. As the president put it, this is “a once-in-a-generation investment in America itself.”
It couldn’t come at a more critical moment. Working people are facing a crisis beyond anything we’ve weathered since the Great Depression. The burdens of this pandemic have fallen squarely on our shoulders, while our communities continue paying the price for decades of failed, corporate-first government.
Now, we find ourselves at a crossroads. We can take corrective action that measures up to the systemic economic and governing failures of the past generation. Or, we can allow the suffering of the past year — and the wage-killing, austerity and anti-worker practices of the last four decades — to continue getting worse.
Overcoming this challenge is going to require unprecedented federal investment in working people and in our communities. Now is the time to take big, aggressive action to ensure we can make our voices heard on the job and take home a fair share of the enormous value we create every day.
That means creating a new generation of good-paying union jobs that guarantee America’s workers family-sustaining wages, quality health care and retirement security that we’ve earned. And, it means tackling the climate injustice, racial injustice and economic injustice that disproportionately hurt working people while benefiting the elite few.
The American Jobs Plan is poised to do exactly that, creating good union jobs by rebuilding our country’s capacity to provide for its people — from fixing our roads and modernizing our energy grid to educating our kids and caring for our retirees.
However, investments alone are far from sufficient. In order to shift the balance of power in favor of working people, we need to rewrite the fundamental rules of the economy. That’s why President Biden called on Congress to strengthen our freedom to organize on the job by finally passing the PRO Act.
More than any of his recent predecessors, Biden understands that unionism is our single best tool for building a fairer economy and a more just society. With a union card in our pocket, workers enjoy higher pay, better benefits and safer workplaces. When faced with discriminatory managers or inequality on the job, union members don’t have to go it alone. When you mess with one of us, you deal with all of us. When we’re free to exercise our right to organize together, working people have the power to make a better future for ourselves.
We can’t afford to simply bandage up the wounds of this pandemic and expect working families to move on. The veil has been pulled back, and the true depth of injustice in our workplaces has been revealed in brutal ways.
From grocery workers forced to put their health on the line to nurses working another shift with worn-out gloves and masks, working people have been told to give everything and receive nothing.
No more. Now’s the time for us to reclaim the dignity and value that’s been stolen away with every underpaid hour on the job. We can’t afford to wait, and we can’t afford to settle for timid half-measures.
If our leaders fail to deliver the kind of generational change we voted for, things will only get worse. But if our leaders follow President Biden’s lead, send these historic measures to his desk, and deliver the change we voted for, we can emerge from this crisis stronger than before.
Richard Trumka is president of the AFL-CIO, America’s labor federation
Taxes, spending with no benefits
by David Ditch
The Biden administration is promoting its American Jobs Plan as an “infrastructure” proposal. In reality, it’s a gargantuan tax-and-spend package that would expand federal power and control in a wide variety of areas.
Although the plan is hyped as a path toward shared goals such as “jobs” and “global competitiveness,” a closer look reveals that it suffers from four core problems that completely undermine those goals.
Problem 1: Destructive tax hikes. Just as the economy is pulling out of the pandemic recession, the plan would slam businesses with $2.7 trillion in tax increases over the next 15 years.
This would reduce incentives for businesses to take risks in hiring new employees and make entrepreneurs less likely to take the biggest risk of all: starting a new enterprise.
In addition, the tax hike would cause America to have the second-highest rate for corporations among major economies after accounting for federal and state taxes. That would hamstring our economic competitiveness, directly contradicting one of the plan’s goals.
Problem 2: Federal infrastructure spending that fails to create jobs. In order to create jobs, the plan would have to overcome the number of jobs destroyed by the tax increase. It would fall well short of just breaking even.
The infrastructure part of the plan follows the same failed path as the 2009 stimulus bill signed by President Barack Obama. A 2013 analysis of the Obama stimulus showed that the infrastructure-spending bump served to divert construction workers from private-sector projects to federal projects, meaning there was a minimal amount of job creation.
Further, federal regulations mean that these projects would have inflated costs for materials and labor, reducing the total number of projects and jobs tied to the spending.
Problem 3: Economically harmful central planning. The plan would lead to more federal involvement in local infrastructure such as schools and water systems, and more micromanagement of private-sector concerns such as energy, manufacturing, housing and more.
History has repeatedly proven that greater government control of the economy leads to worse outcomes.
The health of America’s democracy would also take a turn for the worse if Washington gains even more say over local decisions. Local officials are more accountable to voters and more in tune with local needs and preferences than federal bureaucrats are.
Meanwhile, increasing the number of things Congress is responsible for overseeing would be a recipe for disaster regardless of who holds the reins of power. It would make federal elections even more bitter and winner-takes-all than they already are.
Problem 4: Wasteful infrastructure priorities and false advertising. When federal officials reference infrastructure investments, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the quality of the nation’s highways and bridges, which carry countless amounts of both people and goods from coast to coast and border to border.
However, the Biden plan would only dedicate about 4% of its spending to highways and bridges. It would spend more on mass transit, which carries less than one-tenth as much passenger traffic as highways, and about as much on Amtrak, which was responsible for a microscopic 0.1% of travel in 2019.
On top of the misguided infrastructure choices, the plan also includes massive amounts of spending that have nothing to do with infrastructure.
This includes hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare, “green” slush funds, big subsidies for electric vehicles that will overwhelmingly benefit wealthy households, and a Medicaid benefit expansion. These provisions should stand or fall on their own, not hide behind popular terms like “infrastructure.”
David Ditch is a policy analyst in the Institute for Economic Freedom.by
