Politicians: Building Trades Show The Way In Rebuilding U.S.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
By Mark
Gruenberg, PAI Staff Writer
WASHINGTON (PAI) -- With the federal government
mired in partisan warfare, U.S.
building trades unions are showing the way in
rebuilding the country, while
also reaching out – and putting to work –
the women and minorities who will be
the future of the construction industry, two
top politicians say.
Nevertheless,
speakers at the Building and Construction
Trades Department's
annual legislative conference urged its 3,000
participants to lobby lawmakers
for a renewed, greater federal role in
upgrading the nation's infrastructure,
from “green” factories to rebuilt highways
to more mass transit to new
energy-saving street lights.
The
delegates descended upon Washington March 9-12
just after Democratic
President Barack Obama again demanded lawmakers
pass a 4-year $302 billion
highway-mass transit construction bill, paid
for by closing corporate tax
loopholes. The measure would provide tens of
thousands of new jobs for
construction workers, at a time when 1.1
million construction workers – one of
every eight – are still
jobless.
The department agrees
with Obama, and advocates paying for it by
increasing the
federal gas tax. That tax, now 18.4 cents per
gallon, has stayed the same since
1993. But the House's ruling Republicans
strongly oppose a gas tax hike, and
their dominant Tea Party wing also hates
workers, and federal spending.
Given
that gridlock, the Building Trades – now
renamed North America's Building
Trades -- other unions and the AFL-CIO stepped
into the infrastructure breach
themselves, with $10 billion on infrastructure
spending via the Clinton Global
Initiative, the think tank/ foundation the
former president established.
Some
$8.4 billion of that has already been
committed. And Clinton himself, a
surprise speaker to the conference on March 10,
hailed them for that. Labor's
billions, he said, “show the people on Wall
Street the proper way to invest in
the American economy...When it's all spent,
you'll have 70,000-80,000 new
construction jobs.
“If you want
to raise wages and reduce income inequality,
you have to have
tight labor markets and more investment” in
the U.S., just like at the end of
his term in 2000. “This is an example where
people get together and share the
benefits fairly, and it shows job creation,”
unlike “investment in finance,” he
added, to boisterous applause.
The
$10 billion investment “just scratches the
surface” of rebuilding the U.S.,
Clinton explained. Construction unionists can
also erect energy-efficient
buildings and factories and install new
energy-efficient citylights, and that's
just for starters, he said. But the money for
that should come from the
billions that U.S. corporations have stashed
overseas, to escape taxation,
Clinton added. “If we're going to bring some
of that corporate cash home, I'd
say you gotta put some of those dollars to work
in an infrastructure bank to
put people back to work,” he
declared.
A national
infrastructure bank, which would use public
money to leverage
private investments, is a favored cause of the
building trades and
congressional Democrats. Obama has also
endorsed it. Investing in
infrastructure, Clinton added, is needed
because history shows it could take
the U.S. a decade to get out of the
financier-dug hole. So much was invested in
financial finagling, and so little in raising
workers' incomes, that the crash
was similar to the panics of 1873 and 1893,
during the Gilded Age, he
explained. Given that, “I want an
investment-based, not a transaction-based,
financial system. We're here to invest in
people.”
Thousands of those
people must be women and minorities, said
Martin Walsh, the
former President of the Greater Boston Building
and Construction Trades
Council. Walsh, who since Jan. 6 has been
Boston's mayor, touted a special
Building Pathways program he began as council
president to recruit and train
inner-city minority youth and women in
construction as a model for the country.
Walsh, a Laborers Local 223 member, is the
first active unionist to be mayor of
a major U.S. city in years.
It's
needed, Walsh pointed out, because, as one
other speaker noted, the
average age of a building trades worker in a
typical state, Wisconsin, is 59. Walsh
called the program “a resource for both job
creation and bridge-building”
by construction unions to women and minorities.
“We talk about poverty,
achievement gaps and lack of opportunity. We
need to find ways to create new
jobs and new opportunities” to close the U.S.
income gap. “There's only one
group that can close that gap: Organized
labor.”
That can be done, he added, if everyone –
labor, management and government –
pulls together, added Sean McGarvey, the BCTD
president. Construction
unions and pro-union contractors set the
standard for such cooperation,
McGarvey said. But unions now “must take the
next step” and expand the market
share for themselves and those contractors. If
a pro-union contractor can't bid
on major projects in any city where unions are
strong, something is wrong, he
warned. What the unions offer to contractors
and politicians of both parties is “unmatched
effectiveness at developing talent” in the
skilled crafts, projects that come in on time
and on budget, a stable and well-trained
workforce and creation of a
middle class that will buy goods and lease or
buy space in the structures they
erect, he stated.