SAULT STE. MARIE – If the nation needs a guide to understanding and fixing the ongoing economic Great Recession, as it’s being called, look to what happened in the years before and after the Great Depression, which began with the stock market collapse on Oct. 29, 1929.

“Over and over, you see similar parallels,” said Michigan AFL-CIO President Mark Gaffney, to delegates at the 49th convention of the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council. He suggested that union members in this state and around the nation must forcefully demand that President Barack Obama and the Congress take similar paths to moving the nation out of the moribund economy, similar to what was done by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress in the 1930s.

That is, more government spending focused on putting people back to work, especially in infrastructure jobs, Green jobs, and greater empowerment of workers through passage of the union-friendly Employee Free Choice Act. Today, he said workers should also insist on passage of legislation that provides health care for all Americans.

Gaffney compared the nation’s economic situation before the stock market collapsed in 1929, and before the Great Recession hit last fall:

*During both eras, he said the banking systems had “totally incomprehensible approaches to investing,” with plenty of “risk-taking with other people’s money.”

*Private sector unions then and now represented less than 10 percent of the workforce.

*The balance of income between the rich and poor was wide in both eras. U.S. wages from 2004 to 2007, Gaffney said, rose a grand total of 1 cent when adjusted for the inflation rate.

*Millions of Americans had no means to pay for health care.

And what remedies were applied to both economic disasters? Gaffney again compared what happened in the 1930s with today and said: “I would argue that we’re doing the right things, but without enough force.”

One reason force is necessary: Gaffney said unions are going to emerge from this recession with one-quarter or even a third fewer members as a result of job losses, especially in the auto industry, their suppliers, and associated industries. “We’re losing a helluva lot of members,” he said, “and this is the time we’re going to need to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.”

*Obama has taken a mostly hands-off policy, except to pump money into the banks. Roosevelt closed the banks, when necessary, and set the price for gold every day.

*Roosevelt initiated a jobs project in his first 100 days in office, that put to work more than one million Americans on public works projects. Obama guided through a $787 billion stimulus package through Congress, but many argue that not enough is being spent on shovel-ready projects. “Obama’s stimulus program is great,” Gaffney said. “But I agree with you. Where is it?

*It took until 1935 for the Democratic Congress and President Roosevelt to institute The Wagner Act, which set the course for the establishment of modern unions in the U.S. The modern-day Employee Free Choice – widely anticipated to help unions improve their ability to organize nonunion workers – is waiting in the wings of the Democratic-controlled Congress, pushed back by discussion over health care reform.

The EFCA has easily passed the U.S. House. But organized labor is growing impatient with Senate Democrats, mostly in Red states, who fear the retaliatory wrath of big business at election time. Many in the House of Labor are also getting perturbed with Obama for not using his pulpit to nudge those conservative Democrats to pass the EFCA.

*President Obama entered office in January with a Congress controlled by Democrats. In Roosevelt’s first mid-term Congressional election, in 1934, the American voter embraced the New Deal and increased the Democrats’ majority in both houses of Congress. “In 1934, the country lurched to the left, and President Roosevelt realized that he had been too timid,” Gaffney said. “Roosevelt became militant and more progressive, because people wanted him to do more. Let me suggest that that’s what we have to do with President Obama.”

Gaffney then told of the meeting between labor organizer and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph and Roosevelt. Randolph told Roosevelt of the injustices suffered by black railroad porters, and how thousands of them sought improvements through collective bargaining.

Upon hearing his remarks on behalf of the porters and other workers, FDR replied in attributed remarks: “You know, Mr. Randolph, I've heard everything you've said tonight, and I couldn't agree with you more. I agree with everything that you've said, including my capacity to be able to right many of these wrongs and to use my power and the bully pulpit… but I would ask one thing of you, Mr. Randolph, and that is go out and make me do it.”