Labor wants bigger jobs bill, Stimulus II

WASHINGTON (PAI) – Key senators are drafting a jobs bill that’s worth half as much as the one the House passed in December , and that concentrates on helping small businesses via a tax credit for creating jobs, reports say.

The House bill, worth $154 billion, extended jobless benefits, food stamps and COBRA coverage, among other things.  It also had direct job-creation provisions, such as money to let state and local governments keep workers retained via the stimulus law.

Target for passage of the $82 billion Senate bill is the President’s Day recess.  Its details are still emerging, but it would include aid to state and local governments, money to build infrastructure, spending on alternative energy and the job creation tax credit, said Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill., a co-author.

That’s not enough for labor, says AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka.  The fed is pushing a larger, more expensive and more comprehensive 5-part program.  The Senate bill also dissatisfies Labor Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

“Smaller steps won’t do it.  We have a big recession and we need big steps to deal with it,” Harkin stated.

“We must act on a scale that will be meaningful:  We need more than 10 million jobs just to get out of the hole we’re in.  We want health care fixed.  We want our leaders to break the stranglehold of Wall Street and the big banks and make them pay to repair the economic damage they created,” Trumka said.   “President Obama spoke directly to those concerns.  He called for a jobs bill and putting people to work.”

Labor-backed poll is warning to labor

WASHINGTON (PAI) – The Massachusetts special election for the U.S. Senate, won by Right-Wing Republican Scott Brown in a normally deeply Democratic state, was “a working class revolt” fueled by voter anger at inaction in Washington, a post-election survey says.

The poll, by Guy Molyneux and Mark Bunge of Peter Hart Research Associates, also told the AFL-CIO –  which commissioned it – and congressional Democrats that any candidate who ignores that anger will be in political trouble this fall, the two said.

“This was a working-class revolt, and it reveals the danger to Democrats of not successfully addressing workers’ economic concerns,” they said.

Democratic nominee Martha Coakley, the state attorney general, lost to Brown, a GOP state senator in a legislature that is 88% Democratic.   Brown won by a 52%-45% margin, to become the GOP’s needed 41^st vote to keep filibusters going, and thus killing, everything from health care revision to the Employee Free Choice Act.