Duffy told to stay away from Labor Day Parade
WAUSAU, Wis (WSAU) - Republican lawmakers have been told they aren't welcome at the Labor Day parade in Wausau.
The Marathon County Central Labor Council is sponsor for the parade held September 5th. A spokesman says the group of about 30 labor unions chooses not to invite elected officials it feels have, quoting here, "openly attacked workers' rights." A spokesman for Republican Representative Sean Duffy says the congressman had hoped political differences could have been set aside for what is billed as a family-friendly event.
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At a sprawling manufacturing complex here, hundreds of Chinese laborers are now completing work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Next month, the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field — will be loaded onto a huge ship and transported 6,500 miles to Oakland. There, they will be assembled to fit into the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge.
The project is part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer.
The assembly work in California, and the pouring of the concrete road surface, will be done by Americans. But construction of the bridge decks and the materials that went into them are a Made in China affair. California officials say the state saved hundreds of millions of dollars by turning to China.
“They’ve produced a pretty impressive bridge for us,” Tony Anziano, a program manager at the California Department of Transportation, said a few weeks ago. He was touring the 1.2-square-mile manufacturing site that the Chinese company created to do the bridge work. “Four years ago, there were just steel plates here and lots of orange groves.”
In New York City alone, Chinese companies have won contracts to help renovate the subway system, refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem River and build a new Metro-North train platform near Yankee Stadium. As with the Bay Bridge, American union labor would carry out most of the work done on United States soil.
American steelworker unions have disparaged the Bay Bridge contract by accusing the state of California of sending good jobs overseas and settling for what they deride as poor-quality Chinese steel. Industry groups in the United States and other countries have raised questions about the safety and quality of Chinese workmanship on such projects. Indeed, China has had quality control problems ranging from tainted milk to poorly built schools.
Bridge Comes to San Francisco With a Made-in-China Label
SHANGHAI — Talk about outsourcing.
At a sprawling manufacturing complex here, hundreds of Chinese laborers are now completing work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
Next month, the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field — will be loaded onto a huge ship and transported 6,500 miles to Oakland. There, they will be assembled to fit into the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge.
The project is part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer.
The assembly work in California, and the pouring of the concrete road surface, will be done by Americans. But construction of the bridge decks and the materials that went into them are a Made in China affair. California officials say the state saved hundreds of millions of dollars by turning to China.
“They’ve produced a pretty impressive bridge for us,” Tony Anziano, a program manager at the California Department of Transportation, said a few weeks ago. He was touring the 1.2-square-mile manufacturing site that the Chinese company created to do the bridge work. “Four years ago, there were just steel plates here and lots of orange groves.”
On the reputation of showcase projects like Beijing’s Olympic-size airport terminal and the mammoth hydroelectric Three Gorges Dam, Chinese companies have been hired to build copper mines in the Congo, high-speed rail lines in Brazil and huge apartment complexes in Saudi Arabia.
In New York City alone, Chinese companies have won contracts to help renovate the subway system, refurbish the Alexander Hamilton Bridge over the Harlem River and build a new Metro-North train platform near Yankee Stadium. As with the Bay Bridge, American union labor would carry out most of the work done on United States soil.
American steelworker unions have disparaged the Bay Bridge contract by accusing the state of California of sending good jobs overseas and settling for what they deride as poor-quality Chinese steel. Industry groups in the United States and other countries have raised questions about the safety and quality of Chinese workmanship on such projects. Indeed, China has had quality control problems ranging from tainted milk to poorly built schools.
But executives and officials who have awarded the various Chinese contracts say their audits have convinced them of the projects’ engineering integrity. And they note that with the full financial force of the Chinese government behind its infrastructure companies, the monumental scale of the work, and the prices bid, are hard for private industry elsewhere to beat.
The new Bay Bridge, expected to open to traffic in 2013, will replace a structure that has never been quite the same since the 1989 Bay Area earthquake. At $7.2 billion, it will be one of the most expensive structures ever built. But California officials estimate that they will save at least $400 million by having so much of the work done in China. (California issued bonds to finance the project, and will look to recoup the cost through tolls.)
California authorities say they had little choice but to rebuild major sections of the bridge, despite repairs made after the earthquake caused a section of the eastern span to collapse onto the lower deck. Seismic safety testing persuaded the state that much of the bridge needed to be overhauled and made more quake-resistant.
Eventually, the California Department of Transportation decided to revamp the western span of the bridge (which connects San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island) and replace the 2.2-mile eastern span (which links Yerba Buena to Oakland).
On the eastern span, officials decided to build a suspension bridge with a complex design. The span will have a single, 525-foot tower, anchored to bedrock and supported by a single, enormous steel-wire cable that threads through the suspension bridge.
“We wanted something strong and secure, but we also wanted something iconic,” said Bart Ney, a transportation department spokesman.
A joint venture between two American companies, American Bridge and Fluor Enterprises, won the prime contract for the project in early 2006. Their bid specified getting much of the fabricated steel from overseas, to save money.
California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the “Buy America” provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers.
China, the world’s biggest steel maker, was the front-runner, particularly because it has dominated bridge building for the last decade. Several years ago, Shanghai opened a 20-mile sea bridge; the country is now planning a much longer one near Hong Kong.
The selection of the state-owned Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Company was a surprise, though, because the company made port cranes and had no bridge building experience.
But California officials and executives at American Bridge said Zhenhua’s advantages included its huge steel fabrication facilities, its large low-cost work force and its solid finances. (The company even had its own port and ships.)
“I don’t think the U.S. fabrication industry could put a project like this together,” Brian A. Petersen, project director for the American Bridge/Fluor Enterprises joint venture, said in a telephone interview. “Most U.S. companies don’t have these types of warehouses, equipment or the cash flow. The Chinese load the ships, and it’s their ships that deliver to our piers.”
Despite the American union complaints, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, strongly backed the project and even visited Zhenhua’s plant last September, praising “the workers that are building our Bay Bridge.”
Zhenhua put 3,000 employees to work on the project: steel-cutters, welders, polishers and engineers. The company built the main bridge tower, which was shipped in mid-2009, and a total of 28 bridge decks — the massive triangular steel structures that will serve as the roadway platform.
Pan Zhongwang, a 55-year-old steel polisher, is a typical Zhenhua worker. He arrives at 7 a.m. and leaves at 11 p.m., often working seven days a week. He lives in a company dorm and earns about $12 a day.
“It used to be $9 a day, now it’s $12,” he said Wednesday morning, while polishing one of the decks for the new Bay Bridge. “Everything is getting more expensive. They should raise our pay.”
To ensure the bridge meets safety standards, 250 employees and consultants working for the state of California and American Bridge/Fluor also took up residence in Shanghai.
Asked about reports that some American labor groups had blocked bridge shipments from arriving in Oakland, Mr. Anziano dismissed those as confused.
“That was not about China,” he said. “It was a disagreement between unions about which had jurisdiction and who had the right to unload a shipment. That was resolved.”
“Earlier this year,” said Sweeney, “politicians began taking America’s anti-union, anti-worker crusade a step even further by trampling the rights of public employees and boldly trying to eliminate their unions altogether. I’m sure most of you are familiar with what happened in Wisconsin, where a newly elected conservative governor forced state as well as municipal unions to concede health care and pension benefits, and then outlawed collective bargaining.”
In order to “restore Catholic social teaching to the center of the American Church—a position it still holds in Church doctrine—and renew the partnership between the Church and labor,” Sweeney said that the organized labor movement must become “what amounts to an action arm of Catholic social teaching.” Threatening confrontation, he said, “We need the help of every Catholic leader as well as every Catholic parishioner, not just in matters of public policy, but in direct action that we from time to time must undertake.”
“But I am concerned that the Church’s support for workers and unions has become muted and even confusing,” he said.
Far-left publications, including the Communist Party’s People’s World, praised Sweeney’s address, calling the former labor boss “one of the Catholic Church’s most prominent laymen.”
One speaker, a Chicago priest by the name of Cletus Kiley, has been more outspoken than Sweeney, having been featured in a viral video because of his opening prayer at the AFL-CIO’s 2011 National Building Trades Legislative Conference. In this “prayer” he denounced the “Wall Street gamblers” and the “ultra-wealthy,” adding, “They say our unions have too much voice in political life, but pretend that we don’t see the hand of the Koch brothers and other billionaires underwriting their efforts.” Kiley warned the IPR conference to beware of the Tea Party’s support for small government.
Media Stonewalled as AFL-CIO Boss Scandalizes Catholic University
The Catholic University of America (CUA) may have thought that AFL-CIO President Emeritus John Sweeney’s May 2nd speech on campus would be non-controversial. But Sweeney, a Catholic who doesn’t hide his commitment to socialism and a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party, promised controversy from the start. He attacked conservatives, in particular Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and told the event that opponents of organized labor were out-of-step with the teachings of the church and Jesus Christ Himself. Then, however, Sweeney unloaded on the sponsors of his appearance, attacking university officials as union busters.
Perhaps Sweeney thought his comments would go unanswered, out of deference to the fact that he was a featured speaker and was showered with praise by the liberal organizers of the event as a brilliant labor organizer. But CUA officials struck back, issuing a statement basically accusing Sweeney of lying and having the statement read aloud as Sweeney sat in stunned silence. The sordid affair has had the unintended result of revealing the hand of left-wing billionaire George Soros in the affairs of the national university of the Catholic Church.
This extraordinary development, a major embarrassment for both Sweeney and the CUA, was shocking enough. But university officials then went into damage control, failing to respond for several days to repeated email requests from the press for a complete and unedited copy of the statement refuting Sweeney. Finally, Accuracy in Media was told that Victor Nakas, associate vice president for public affairs at CUA, was handling the controversy. But he was busy with other matters and was unavailable.
CUA officials were apparently operating on the assumption that the conference had been ignored by the press and that reporters would have no immediate access to what Sweeney had said and what the university said in response.
In fact, a recording of the event turned up and demonstrates that the statement issued by CUA officials takes issue with almost everything said by the former labor boss and accuses organized labor of manipulating and abusing workers at this institution of higher learning.
The two-day conference was sponsored by Catholic University’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies (IPR) and titled “120th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum: Church, Labor, and the New Things of the Modern World.”Rerum Novarum, a papal document on labor and capital, is behind much of the “social justice” teaching that animates “progressive” Catholics these days who support Obama and want to overlook his anti-Catholic record on matters such as abortion and homosexual rights. Not surprisingly, the Obama Administration sent a representative, Alexia K. Kelley, deputy director, White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, to speak at the event. Officials of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also participated.
“Earlier this year,” said Sweeney, “politicians began taking America’s anti-union, anti-worker crusade a step even further by trampling the rights of public employees and boldly trying to eliminate their unions altogether. I’m sure most of you are familiar with what happened in Wisconsin, where a newly elected conservative governor forced state as well as municipal unions to concede health care and pension benefits, and then outlawed collective bargaining.”
In order to “restore Catholic social teaching to the center of the American Church—a position it still holds in Church doctrine—and renew the partnership between the Church and labor,” Sweeney said that the organized labor movement must become “what amounts to an action arm of Catholic social teaching.” Threatening confrontation, he said, “We need the help of every Catholic leader as well as every Catholic parishioner, not just in matters of public policy, but in direct action that we from time to time must undertake.”
“But I am concerned that the Church’s support for workers and unions has become muted and even confusing,” he said.
Far-left publications, including the Communist Party’s People’s World, praised Sweeney’s address, calling the former labor boss “one of the Catholic Church’s most prominent laymen.”
One speaker, a Chicago priest by the name of Cletus Kiley, has been more outspoken than Sweeney, having been featured in a viral video because of his opening prayer at the AFL-CIO’s 2011 National Building Trades Legislative Conference. In this “prayer” he denounced the “Wall Street gamblers” and the “ultra-wealthy,” adding, “They say our unions have too much voice in political life, but pretend that we don’t see the hand of the Koch brothers and other billionaires underwriting their efforts.” Kiley warned the IPR conference to beware of the Tea Party’s support for small government.
But Kiley’s support for “social justice” has been undermined by accusations that he was among a number of Chicago-area Catholic officials who played down the testimony of a sex abuse victim in the church in order to protect a priest who later resigned in disgrace
Sweeney, who praised Kiley’s approach to organized labor, spoke on May 2nd at the IPR conference, while Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, spoke on May 3rd at an evening function. Sweeney, who had been head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) before taking over the AFL-CIO, shared the dais with Turkson on the second day as well and was in fact allowed to respond to his remarks. Turkson, in contrast to Sweeney, emphasized that Rerum Novarum was opposed to socialism.
Although Rerum Novarum is a controversial document and has elements that are both pro-union and anti-socialist, the IPR conference was completely one-sided, ignoring conservative American Catholics who favor the free enterprise system. The event featured not only Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but Harold Meyerson, a DSA vice-chair and Washington Post columnist. Meyerson is not a Catholic and used the occasion of the event at CUA to pay tribute to his mentor, socialist Michael Harrington, who completely abandoned the Catholic Church and became an atheist.
Sweeney’s membership in DSA put him close to Obama, who was supported by the Chicago DSA in his political campaigns for office. As President, Obama gave Sweeney the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The AFL-CIO hailed this as the nation’s highest civilian honor.
However, before Sweeney’s response to Turkson was allowed to occur at the CUA event, Stephen Schneck, director of IPR and associate professor of politics at CUA, said that he had to read an official statement denouncing Sweeney for his attack on university officials. It was clear that he had been ordered to do so. Sweeney, on the dais with Turkson and Bishop Stephen E. Blaire, chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, had to sit through the tongue-lashing, which took place before an audience of about 100 people, including several priests.
The controversy stemmed from Sweeney’s remarks on May 2nd. Sweeney had said, “I’m reminded of the time not too many years ago when we scheduled a demonstration here at this university over a dispute between the workers’ union and the administration. The then-president of CUA called a certain member of the hierarchy, who then called me and asked me to cancel the demonstration in exchange for a promise to deal with our issues. I canceled the demonstration. But I never heard back from either of them…I share that little story not to disparage our esteemed leaders—my calls for help from the hierarchy have most often been answered.”
But the “esteemed leaders” and the hierarchy ordered Schneck to read a statement taking issue with almost everything Sweeney had said about them and the union problems at CUA.
Keeping in mind that CUA President John Garvey had introduced the conference and has emphasized intellect and virtue during his inaugural year at CUA, Schneck read a university statement that essentially accused Sweeney of abandoning those values:
“During his remarks about a labor issue at Catholic University that began in 1999, he implied that the then-president of the Catholic University refused to engage in a dialogue with him about the matter. In fact, the president of the university along with one of his vice presidents met face to face with Mr. Sweeney to discuss the labor issue.
“Mr. Sweeney also stated that the conflict was between the university administration and the workers union. In September 1999 approximately 130 CUA custodial and maintenance workers were involuntarily transferred from one union to a local of the Service Employees International Union. They protested their incorporation into SEIU not just through the university administration but also to the National Labor Relations Board and petitioned the latter to decertify SEIU. The university adopted a position of neutrality over the matter of union representation, stipulating only that the workers have an opportunity to make a free choice by a secret ballot election. SEIU opposed this position, pressuring the workers to accept their forcible incorporation. Eventually when SEIU concluded that the university would not be swayed from its position, it agreed to a secret ballot election conducted by a neutral third party. The election was held on February 2, 2001, and SEIU lost.”
In an understatement, the university officials went on, “Our recollection of events differs from Mr. Sweeney’s.”
Not only were there different recollections, the controversy suggests that someone was lying—and that someone, according to CUA, was Sweeney. Significantly, Sweeney had nothing to say in response to the scathing CUA statement that was read aloud in front of him.
None of this seemed to bother the group called Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), which distributed Sweeney’s speech without noting that the university had condemned some of his remarks. It turns out that the CUA’s Schneck is on the CACG board, that White House official Alexia Kelley served as the group’s Executive Director and co-founder, and its current chairman, Fred Rotondaro, is a Senior Fellow at the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.
In another interesting development, CACG is itself funded by Soros, an admitted atheist.
Perhaps conservative Catholics will want to take a closer look at what is happening at a Catholic institution of higher learning that describes itself as “faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ as handed on by the Church.”
| Leading Union Political Campaign Contributors | |||
|
| Democrats | Republicans |
|
| American Fed. of State, County, & Municipal Employees | $40,281,900 | $547,700 |
|
| Intel Brotherhood of Electrical Workers | 29,705,600 | 679,000 |
|
| National Education Association | 27,679,300 | 2,005,200 |
|
| Service Employees International Union | 26,368,470 | 98,700 |
|
| Communication Workers of America | 26,305,500 | 125,300 |
|
| Service Employees International Union | 26,252,000 | 1,086,200 |
|
| Laborers Union | 25,734,000 | 138,000 |
|
| American Federation of Teachers | 25,682,800 | 200,000 |
|
| United Auto Workers | 25,082,200 | 182,700 |
|
| Teamsters Union | 24,926,400 | 1,822,000 |
|
| Carpenters and Joiners Union | 24,094,100 | 658,000 |
|
| Machinists & Aerospace Workers Union | 23,875,600 | 226,300 |
|
| United Food and Commercial Workers Union | 23,182,000 | 334,200 |
|
| AFL-CIO | 17,124,300 | 713,500 |
|
| Sheet Metal Workers Union | 16,347,200 | 342,800 |
|
| Plumbers & Pipefitters Union | 14,790,000 | 818,500 |
|
| Operating Engineers Union | 13,840,000 | 2,309,500 |
|
| Airline Pilots Association | 12,806,600 | 2,398,300 |
|
| International Association of Firefighters | 12,421,700 | 2,685,400 |
|
| United Transportation Workers | 11,807,000 | 1,459,300 |
|
| Ironworkers Union | 11,638,900 | 936,000 |
|
| American Postal Workers Union | 11,633,100 | 544,300 |
|
| Nat'l Active & Retired Fed. Employees Association | 8,135,400 | 2,294,600 |
|
| Seafarers International Union | 6,726,800 | 1,281,300 |
|
| Source: Center for Responsive Politics, Washington, D.C. | |||
When Government Unions Win, Everybody Else Loses
Not too much good news about public education coming out of our nation’s capital. Michelle Rhee resigned as chancellor of the Washington, DC school system. She was doing everything she could to break the left-wing teachers’ union’s power to protect its deadwood teachers and principals. She modified the teacher evaluation process by taking student progress on tests into consideration and she fired over 200 ineffective teachers and administrators. She had the support of Mayor Adrian Fenty, but other public employee unions including the infamously left-wing SEIU joined up to defeat him and pull the rug out from under Rhee. The American Federation of Teachers spent over $1 million in the effort.
Unions won. Students lost.
This came on the heels of another bit of bad news last year in our capitol city when Congress (which administers the District of Columbia) eliminated a school choice program for 1700 DC school children. President Obama, who sends his children to an expensive private school in DC, did nothing to support the school choice program for poor DC kids. Democrats are beholden to the teachers’s unions, which are the biggest supporters of that party nationwide, just ahead of trial lawyers. School choice anywhere it’s offered is anathema to teachers’ unions. Most of their political capital is spent defeating school choice (voucher) programs nationwide.
Here too, unions won. Students lost.
Shortly after Michelle Rhee resigned, the DC school system started feeding dinner to students as well as breakfast and lunch. According to an article at change.org, “This new early dinner program will feed 10,000 kids who may spend up to 10 hours a day at school in early-care and after-school programs.” So, now US taxpayers are feeding three meals a day to school kids in our nation’s capital. They’re spending ten hours a day in school with early care and after school programs, yet change.org is lamenting that food stamp aid may be cut to pay for it. “Forty percent of households reported not having enough money to buy food at least one time,” the article claims, and the federal government is “robbing Peter to pay Paul” when it cuts food stamps.
Why don’t those households have enough money for food when their kids are getting two or three free meals at school in addition to their food stamps? Are they bartering their food stamp benefits for other things on the street corner? According to an article in the Washington Examiner, the Washington DC school system has the fattest kids in the country. “The District has the highest childhood obesity rate in the country [according to] the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” yet we’re supposed to feed them still more? What the heck is going on down there?
Most newspapers report the per-pupil cost for DC schools at $13,000 per year, but if an article in the Washington Times is correct, the real number is $24,600! That’s the figure you get when you take all the money spent on the schools and divided it by the number of students. My only question at this point is: when are we going to provide beds for them? We babysit them before and after school, we feed them, we teach them to brush their teeth, teach them about the birds and the bees, provide counseling - so what’s left for parents to do? Where is it going to end?
The school choice program that Democrats in Congress cut cost the Washington DC school district only $7500 per pupil. At $24,600 per pupil the District spends, that would be a net savings of more than $17,000 per student. The 1700 students who took advantage of it were thriving. Their parents were happy with it too, but the teachers’ unions were not because it shone a bright light on what a bloated, corrupt education bureaucracy the unions created and preserved. If it expanded and was copied across the country, the teachers’ union monopoly would be smashed and Democrats would lose their biggest constituency. It had to go.
The federal government administers Washington, DC. Its schools are among the most expensive in the country, yet its students score among the lowest on standardized tests. If there’s a congressman or senator who sends his/her kids to the public schools in that city, I don’t know who it is. Nevertheless, that same federal government is taking more and more control of all the nation’s schools through an expanding US Department of Education.
As a long-time public school teacher, I don’t see that as an encouraging trend.
The working class plays a leading role in the struggle for various demands, but many of the key needs of working people cannot be won by the trade union movement or the working class alone. Unions must engage in coalitions with community, civil rights, women’s, student, senior, and other organizations in order to increase their combined ability to win against a powerful enemy. From strike struggles to legislative initiatives to the fight for the White House, labor must build unity with other social forces to achieve victory. Only the unity of millions of working people led by the working class can win a revolutionary struggle.
The unity of labor and community cannot be based solely on the demands and leadership of labor. Labor must take up the fight for the demands of its allies on the basis of mutual trust and commitment. This allows for the working class to establish its leading role among the mass movements as a whole. The Communist Party always seeks to build principled unity among the working class and all progressive social forces to further their interests and power.
New levels of unity and new alliances and coalitions have developed in the working class movement in the recent period. The common struggle against capitalist globalization has ushered in an advanced phase of working unity between the labor movement, the environmental movement, the student movement, and others. Shifts in labor’s immigration policy have allowed a new level of unity with immigrant rights organizations. Labor has increased its support of and work with labor/student solidarity organizations in recent years. There is a constant need to reinforce and defend this unity on the basis of common work, mutual respect, and understanding.
At all strategic stages of struggle from the present to the construction of socialism, the working class is the most important and consistent class and the only one whose interests are entirely on the side of progress and socialism. That does not mean that at every moment, in every struggle, it will in fact be the leader. But the working class will tend more and more to become the leader of struggles for progress and socialism.
The working class, however, cannot be the sole force in these struggles, because its opponents at each stage are powerful, with great resources at their command. There are other major social forces whose interests substantially parallel those of the working class as a whole. Only with the maximum of unity and powerful alliances can victory in a peaceful manner be assured.
The labor movement is the organized sector of the working class and is the key strategic factor to achieving fundamental social change. The diversity of the labor movement is growing in composition and leadership in recent years. The working class is constantly being joined by some who were once independent professionals—including doctors and engineers— but are now employees of vast corporations. The labor movement is no longer limited to “pure and simple” trade union struggles. It plays a major, often leading role, in legislative and electoral struggles and has developed a large and increasingly independent labor electoral apparatus. It has developed on-going relationships with organizations of the nationally and racially oppressed, women, students, and others. It is increasingly seeking forms of international labor cooperation.
In a Labor Day statement the White House released Monday as Obama headed for a union picnic in Ohio, Obama voiced confidence that "working Americans will help our nation emerge from this crisis."
He also paid tribute in the holiday proclamation to the contributions working people have made over the course of history, saying they have "carried us through times of challenge and uncertainty."
Obama chose a Labor Day union picnic as the backdrop to announce his selection of Ron Bloom as senior counselor for manufacturing policy. Bloom planned to travel to Cincinnati with Obama for an afternoon announcement at the AFL-CIO event.
Obama to name manufacturing adviser at picnic
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama says the country still faces a "vast and complex" economic crisis and is pledging to work with business and labor to make things better.
In a Labor Day statement the White House released Monday as Obama headed for a union picnic in Ohio, Obama voiced confidence that "working Americans will help our nation emerge from this crisis."
He also paid tribute in the holiday proclamation to the contributions working people have made over the course of history, saying they have "carried us through times of challenge and uncertainty."
WASHINGTON (AP)—President Barack Obama is tapping a member of his auto industry task force to advise him on manufacturing.
Obama chose a Labor Day union picnic as the backdrop to announce his selection of Ron Bloom as senior counselor for manufacturing policy. Bloom planned to travel to Cincinnati with Obama for an afternoon announcement at the AFL-CIO event.
Bloom was senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as part of the auto industry task force since February. Bloom, a Harvard Business School graduate, previously advised the United Steelworkers union and worked as an investment banker.
Bloom will work with the National Economic Council to lead policy development and planning for Obama's work to revitalize U.S. manufacturing, the White House said.
Obama's speech to union members was the first of at least three speeches this week.
Meanwhile, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who will join Obama at the Ohio labor event, said Monday she sees "stabilization occurring" in the job market, saying some sectors have shown improvement.
But in an interview on NBC's "Today" show, Solis also said, "It's certainly not somewhere where we need it to be right now." She said the administration is deploying "everything in our toolbox" to try to steady shaky labor markets, adding that job-training efforts will be stepped up this fall.
"I would first of all say that we understand that ... this number (9.7 jobless rate) is very unacceptable," Solis said. "What I would like to say this Labor Day is, 'Don't be discouraged. Come visit our offices, get to know our staff, figure out if you need to plan out a new job, a new career, get into a new education program.' "
Obama's remarks were expected to touch on health care in advance of a Wednesday evening address to Congress on his proposed overhaul. On Tuesday, Obama will speak to American children as they begin the school year.
The AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic normally draws up to 20,000 people, union spokesman Eddie Vale said. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka were expected to welcome Obama to the gathering.
