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Our Workplace Press articlesThere’s Work That Needs to Be Done, Yet People Can’t Find a Job – It’s a Disgrace!
One out of every ten workers either can’t find a job or is working only part-time or on call because no full time, permanent jobs are available.
And that’s according to the government’s doctored statistics. Reality is much worse.
When asked about jobs, John McCain and Barack Obama criticize each other, but they propose the same remedies.
In the short term, they both propose another “stimulus” package like the one Bush pushed through. Pitiful.
In the long run, they each propose to give more tax breaks and subsidies to the big corporations, pretending this will create jobs.
Bush did this already – but it didn’t create any jobs, only more profits for the companies.
Why shouldn’t the government take that same money, but use it to create jobs directly?
There certainly are plenty of things that need to be done. If every rotting bridge were to be repaired or replaced, if every broken-up road made driveable again, millions of people could be put to work. And that’s only the beginning of work that needs to be done – work that would launch many millions of jobs.
Dams need to be repaired. Five per cent of all dams in the country are so unsafe they could collapse without further warning, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. And this doesn’t take into account the levees all up and down the Mississippi River system.
There are almost 50 million students in public schools – and most of them study in schools that are substandard, crowded or even unsafe. And with the number of pupils increasing by over a third of a million every year, tens of thousands new schools are needed, and hundreds of thousands of teachers – just to catch up.
Playgrounds, parks and rec centers need to be cleaned up, expanded, opened up, added to – and given staff.
Tens of thousands of clinics and people to staff them are needed – just to take care of all those people without medical coverage today.
Mass transit systems that you can depend on are needed in every city.
With all those things that need to be built or established or run or repaired, there is no reason for any person to be without work.
Vast public works programs have been carried out before. Corporations themselves have been forced to hire many more people – during periods when the working class mobilized to fight so that its interests were addressed.
The working people of this country already know what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed, what’s about to fall down, what’s missing, what should be added. It doesn’t take a ten year study to find out.
All it requires is a government that puts the interests of the population before the interests of the wealthy who have lived off government handouts for years.
But that’s exactly what neither party has done, and what neither Obama nor McCain is proposing to do today. We won’t get the jobs we need by waiting for one of them to get elected.
But if we start putting our demands forward now, whoever gets elected can be forced to answer.