Union Movement Hits the Road Over Job Losses
By Peter Szekely
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With jobs looming as a presidential campaign issue, the American labor movement on Wednesday launched a Rust Belt bus tour to highlight the plight of workers who have been passed over by the economic recovery.
The tour will bus workers from each of 50 states and Washington, D.C., on a roundabout route from St. Louis to the nation's capital to deliver the message that the economy cannot be well if the job market is not well, organizers said.
"We want to change the debate about what constitutes a healthy economy," said Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America, which is co-sponsoring the tour with the AFL-CIO.
Working America, with 125,000 members, is a recently formed advocacy group for nonunion workers that is one of 64 affiliates of the AFL-CIO, a federation of unions that represent 13 million workers.
The organizers insist the caravan is not a political event but the AFL-CIO has already endorsed Democratic candidate John Kerry over President Bush and the proposed itinerary goes through eight states that could swing either way in the November election.
Jobs were a major topic among the candidates in the Democratic field with Sen. John Edwards basing much of his losing effort on the issue of getting jobs back.
Republicans say Bush's tax cuts will create more jobs if given a chance, while Democrats accuse the administration of doing nothing to stem the flow of American jobs to low-wage countries.
"We think that political debates are important times to advance issues," said AFL-CIO spokeswoman Denise Mitchell. "And we want to be sure that jobs are on people's minds."
The U.S. economy has been on a dual track since it emerged from recession in November 2001. Traditional measures are strong: economic output grew 3.3 percent in 2003, productivity rose 4.4 percent, stock prices increased and corporate profits surged 10.1 percent in the third quarter of last year.
But job creation has lagged. The Labor Department's survey of businesses found that only 364,000 jobs were created in the past six months. That still leaves a deficit of 3 million private sector jobs, mostly in manufacturing, since Bush took office in January 2001.
"Life is getting harder for most working people and that part of the story just was not getting told," said Nussbaum.
EIGHT BATTLEGROUND STATES
To tell the workers' story, a small bus caravan will leave St. Louis on Wednesday to bring tales of unemployment, underemployment, outsourcing and crippling health care costs to eight states, most of them already hit hard by job losses."Hopefully, it will open the eyes of lawmakers, politicians, rulemakers, whoever -- and they can get stricter on these trade agreements and keep the jobs in this country," said Jerry Nowadzky, who represents Iowa on the tour.
From their bus painted with "Show Us the Jobs" in giant letters, the workers will attend rallies, discussion groups, breakfasts and local press briefings at 16 stops in Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania before arriving in Washington on March 31.
In 2000, most of them had victory margins of less than 5 percent, with Democrat Al Gore winning five and Bush taking three. The eight states are among the so-called battleground states that could swing either to Bush or Kerry.
Despite the states' strategic importance in a race in which the AFL-CIO is backing Kerry, organizers insist politics has less to do with the tour than their message about jobs.
Nussbaum noted that no politicians will take part in the events and the jobs message was aimed at state and local leaders as well as presidential candidates.
"Unions fight for good jobs and justice in the economy," she said. "This is our job. This is what we're meant to do."
Still, the tour is bypassing two nearby states that, while reeling from job losses, are not considered major battlegrounds: Illinois, which Gore won handily in 2000 and tends Democratic, and Indiana, a solid Bush state that has a long history of backing Republicans.
Workers on the bus, 24 of whom are union members and 27 of whom are not, were selected from unions and community groups.
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