By Harry Kelber

We are all in lots of trouble - and it's not going to end soon.

Think of how many workers have lost their jobs, their homes and their savings in the current economic crisis. And how little attention is being paid in Washington to the plight of America's working families. So how should Labor respond?

Don't let them kid us; we're in a deepening recession. The tell-tale signs are all there. The unemployment rate has jumped from 5.7% to 6.1%, the highest in five years. For eight consecutive months of layoffs, the nation's employers have eliminated more than 600,000 badly-needed jobs - and that's not the end of it.

While the Bush administration has bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it has done precious little to help the tens of thousands of middle class families that have lost their homes. And there is no relief from the exorbitant interest charges of the credit card companies that reap extra billions of dollars from working people who fall into debt.

The nation's financial system is in turmoil. The stock market dropped 504 points in a single day. Lehman Brothers is applying for bankruptcy; Merrill Lynch sold itself to the Bank of America; AIG, the world's top insurer, is asking for a $75 billion loan, and countless banks and financial institutions are worried about how they are going to survive in the chaotic days ahead.

While the government is focused on stabilizing the economy, almost no attention is being paid to the financial losses suffered by millions of workers and retirees, many of whom are seeing much of their life savings disappear and their dreams of a comfortable retirement shattered.

Then there is the daunting problem of what to do about the devastation in Texas caused by the Ike hurricane and the largely incomplete effort to rescue Louisiana from the ravages of Katrina. And let's not forget the $10 billion a month that is costing us for the war in Iraq.

Some 800,000 workers will run out of their unemployment insurance checks by next month, but the House is just now considering an extension of benefits, possibly through a second "stimulus" package, which labor supports but the White House opposes. But what the unemployed really need and want are jobs.

What is most alarming is that the top financial officials in the Bush administration and their Wall Street advisers have not come up with a plan that will guarantee to get the nation out of this mess, nor can they predict how long it will last. Alan Greenspan, long-time Federal Reserve chairman said the current economic climate is "by far" the worst he has ever seen, and added "let's recognize that this is a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event."

A job program worked during the Great Depression.

Organized labor should mobilize its 16 million union members to promote a jobs program that proved its worth in the 1930s, during the worst economic crisis in American history, when only about 25% of the nation's workers had full-time jobs and another 25% was on part-time.

Here is a record of what was accomplished by the several million workers employed by the public works agencies of the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt:

In less than two years, they built or improved 225,000 miles of roads, 30,000 schools, nearly 4,000 playgrounds and athletic fields, 1,000 airports and hundreds of hospitals, post offices, court houses, bridges, dams, tunnels and other infrastructure installations. They literally changed the face of America.

Their monumental achievement was the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which produced and sold cheap electric power and fertilizer to communities in a seven-state area, whose inhabitants for the first time had electricity to light their homes and operate their equipment.

If we had a national plan for public works projects, we could rebuild the Texas and Louisiana communities, while repairing our roads, bridges, dams and other infrastructure installations so they are safe and serviceable. At the same time, we would be providing jobs for millions of unemployed workers, who would become taxpayers.

Union leaders and members may suggest other, and possibly better, proposals for defending working families, and we should carefully consider them. But one thing we should not do is to stand silently on the sidelines, while allowing others who do not have our interests at heart to make decisions about our future.