As Unemployment Numbers Rise, President Urged To Use Executive Authority To Create ‘Good Jobs’ With Living Wages, Revitalize Middle Class

Federal Spending, Labor Regulations Provide Obama with Options to Use Executive Authority, According to Special Report by American Prospect/Demos

Read the report here: http://www.prospect.org/cs/archive/view_report?reportId=102

Washington, D.C.  – With Labor Day this weekend, and with new weekly unemployment claims still hovering around 500,000 people, President Obama’s own executive power is a key to creating jobs at higher wages, according to a new special report by “The American Prospect,” the nation’s premier magazine of progressive politics and policy.  This report is published in collaboration with Demos, a national research and policy center.

For 30 years, America has been moving away from a middle-class society anchored in good jobs. The current financial crisis has only worsened this trend. There are numerous challenges to pushing a “good jobs” agenda, including a weakened labor movement, the lack of an industrial or trade policy that addresses employment, the absence of a serious labor market policy, and government’s failure, even in a deep recession, to focus on creating living wage jobs. The new Demos/American Prospect Special Report offers several crucial reforms that the federal government can undertake to reverse this trend. The issue is edited by Robert Kuttner, a Prospect Co-founding Editor, a Senior Fellow at Demos, and longtime reporter on labor and economic policy.

Topics and Authors featured in the “Jobs Well Done” Special Report:

-- Harold Meyerson on the misclassification of regular workers as temporary or contract employees, and the potential impact of a high-profile and systematic enforcement effort targeted at the large companies that employee them.

-- David Moberg on Pentagon contractors that are notorious low-wage employers, and why there is a national security case for government to set and enforce labor standards in defense contracting. This piece looks specifically at the principal contractors producing MREs and military uniforms.

-- David Bensman, Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relationships at Rutgers University, on federal reclassification of transportation workers and reforming US ports by modernizing safety systems and requiring trucker certification. *He will be on the press call to answer questions.

-- Steve Franklin on how the Department of Agriculture, which spends upwards of $800 million on produce for the school lunch program, can extend bargaining rights to farm workers and sponsor a bill of rights that includes access to sanitary facilities, clean water, and decent housing.

-- Jan Breidenbach on making sure that government-sponsored green housing jobs, which includes the installation of solar panels and retrofitting homes, are high-wage jobs.

-- And others on paying childcare workers a decent wage, insisting on high- quality manufacturing jobs, and the broad social and economic benefits of a high-wage workforce.

“The American Prospect” is America’s leading liberal magazine of politics and public affairs. A blend of essay, criticism, investigation, commentary, and in-depth analysis, the magazine stands for a politically muscular liberalism. Founded in 1990 by Robert B. Reich, Robert Kuttner, and Paul Starr, the magazine is published from Washington, D.C., 10 times yearly. As of 2010, “The American Prospect” is published in partnership with the nonpartisan research and policy think tank Demos.

Visit The American Prospect online at www.prospect.org

Visit Demos at www.demos.org

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