Hawkins Says Government Should Guarantee Right to Living Wage Job
Howie Hawkins for Congress
25th District, New York
www.howiehawkins.org
Media Release
For Immediate Release: Monday, October 27, 2008
For More Information: Howie Hawkins, 315-425-1019, hhawkins@igc.org
Howie Hawkins, the Green Populist candidate for Congress in the 25th District, said today that rather than guaranteeing the profits of Wall Street bankers and speculators, Congress should guarantee a living wage job for everyone who wants one.
"The federal government should guarantee the right to a job at a living wage for every person willing and able to work. Private jobs are good. But public jobs are necessary for full employment. When people cannot find jobs in the private sector, they should be able to go to their local Employment Office not the Unemployment Office and say, "I want my job." And they should be put to work in public works and services to meet needs defined by that local community," Hawkins said.
"The government should be the employer of last resort. The first step is to rebuild our real economy of production, particularly manufacturing and construction, by a massive investment in a green jobs program, starting with retrofitting every building in America for energy efficiency and renewable energy and building renewable energy sources based primarily on wind and solar power. We need to invest in rebuilding our country’s infrastructure, especially our energy inefficient transportation infrastructure by rebuilding our railroads and mass transit systems instead of remaining totally dependent on the fossil-fueled roadways that account for two-thirds of US oil consumption," Hawkins said.
Hawkins added that the financial crisis highlighted the need for community and regional planning to create jobs and economic development. "We should also redirect our federal economic development programs away from corporate welfare for big business in the form of tax breaks and subsidies. Instead, we should emphasize low cost loans and technical assistance from public banks targeted to locally owned businesses and family farmers, and particularly worker and consumer cooperatives. We can’t rely on the big multi-state and multi-national businesses that have abandoned our region’s communities to profit from repressive, cheap labor, low regulation, low tax regimes in the anti-labor so-called right-to-work states and overseas. Instead, public economic development programs should flow from democratic community and regional plans developed by the residents and businesses in those communities and regions. The failure of unrestricted capital markets to allocate investment efficiently to the real economy of production for community benefit is now clear for all to see with the Wall Street meltdown. It’s time for democratic planning of investment to make finance serve the real economy of labor and industry and the communities in which production takes place," said Hawkins.
Hawkins also called for an immediate hike in the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour and a guaranteed minimum income built into progressive income tax. President Nixon was the last president to seriously promote a guaranteed minimum income.
"It's time for Congress to finally act upon FDR's 1944 call for an Economic Bill of Rights that will guarantee economic security for all Americans. It should include the right to a job at a living wage or a guaranteed income above poverty, Social Security, pension security, free full-coverage health care, free public education from Head Start through college, and affordable housing, transportation, and energy. It's time for Economic Populism: fair trade, progressive taxation, labor law reform, prosecution of corporate crime, real regulation and transparency, taxes on speculation and pollution," Hawkins added.
Since January 2001, 2.7 million jobs have been lost and more than 75% of those jobs have been high wage, high productivity manufacturing jobs. Overall 5.6% of Americans are unemployed while 10.5% of African Americans are unemployed. Unemployment among Latinos is nearly 30 per cent higher than on January 20, 2001 when the Bush administration took office.
Hawkins said that government economic development programs should have much higher goals to hire low-income community residents, people of color and women. He said the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities touted by Democrat Dan Maffei do not address this problem because they focus on tax breaks and subsidies for business, rather than direct support for people living in low-income communities.
"We see local government, with encouragement by federal programs like the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities, throwing more and more money away in tax breaks and subsidies to attract new jobs and businesses. This trickle-down approach has yielded little in the way of business development and what development has occurred has largely bypassed the community residents who need it most. Low-income communities, particularly communities of color, face both direct discrimination, in the form of prejudiced hiring practices, and indirect discrimination, in the form of restricted access to jobs," said Hawkins. "And when people are not making money, they are not spending money. When redevelopment money, through local hiring initiatives, flows to local residents, those residents will spend much of it in the neighborhood, revitalizing the retail sector and preserving or creating further jobs for their neighbors," he added.
Increasing incentives for energy efficiency for instance creates substantial new construction investment and good jobs retrofitting buildings. Energy efficiency is far more labor intensive than generation, creating 21.5 jobs for every $1 million invested, compared to 11.5 jobs for new natural gas generation. These jobs include installation, ongoing operations and maintenance of building systems, and new manufacturing to meet the increased demand for energy efficient appliances and building systems.
According to a 2007 report released by the American Solar Energy Society, renewable energy industries today amount to nearly $1 trillion in revenue in the United States, generating more than $150 billion in tax revenue at the federal, state and local levels. The report indicates that, by 2030 the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries could create 40 million jobs, and generate up to $4.5 trillion in revenue in the United States. Hawkins pointed out that the NYS Office of the State Comptroller estimates that the production of renewable energy to meet the State’s Renewable Portfolio Standard goal could generate up to 43,000 new jobs here.
A recent report by the Apollo Alliance showed that a $30 billion investment per year for 10 years in energy conservation and renewable energy would provide the following benefits:
Add more than 3.3 million jobs to the economy
Stimulate $1.4 trillion in new Gross Domestic Product
Stimulate the economy through adding $953 billion in Personal Income and $323.9 billion in Retail Sales
Produce $284 billion in net energy cost savings
By creating jobs and economic growth, this investment will generate sufficient new returns to the US treasury from increased income, to pay for itself over a ten-year period, according to the Apollo Alliance study.
"The basic issue is whether government will begin to support average people or continue to support the super-rich and the giant corporations. The economic security of working people has been destroyed. Workers' wages have been stagnant for 35 years while the top 1 percent appropriated nearly all the gains in economic output and productivity. The economy has been hollowed out by financial speculation, the military pork barrel, and unsustainable trade, private, and public deficits instead of investment in the real economy of public infrastructure and domestic manufacturing. The climate emergency and peak oil demand a World War II scale mobilization to build renewable energy sources, mass transit, railroads, regionalized sustainable manufacturing and agriculture, and other green infrastructure," Hawkins concluded.
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