No Limits Foundation Supports UCubed’s Hire US, America Plan

The No Limits Foundation, a non-partisan, domestic and international issues-based organization, has joined the call to Hire US, America.

Leecia Eve, the No Limits Vice President for Policy, shared the organization’s support for the plan, including a new and comprehensive industrial policy, while speaking last week at the 2010 IAM National Staff Conference in Houston, TX.

“We, like you, demand that our nation answer the call of millions of Americans who are pleading, simply . . . Hire Us America,” said Eve.

A transcript of her full remarks is available below:

I am so honored to be here, to join you – a union with a long and strong history – to speak about the most pressing issue that we as a nation face; and that is for too many weeks and months, in some cases even years, too many productive Americans have been trying as hard as they can to work, yet can’t find a job.

These are extraordinary times because of all of the challenges that we face around the world and here at home, but the economic crisis we are in now stands alone because it is something so different, the likes of which we have never seen.

We are, literally, running on empty.

Millions of us are looking for work and can’t find it.

Our savings, if we had any, are gone. The bills we had when were working, well, now that we’re not working they seem a heck of lot bigger. It’s become harder and harder to feed and clothe our kids and to keep our homes. We’re trying to pay our mortgage but we’re also feeling like we are just burning money because the mortgage is more than the house is now worth. And with our neighbor to the left of us and possibly to the right of us in foreclosure, we know the value of our home will continue to plummet.

We are strong, but after months of trying our hardest to find work, even the most confident among us feels insecure.

We feel like we are losing out, but our country is too.

American workers – we are the best in the world. That’s why having millions of us idle rather than putting our skills to work makes absolutely no sense; it’s bad for our collective morale, bad for our fiscal health, and it’s bad for our economy.

We’ve been through recessions before.  We have weathered the storms. But this one – this Great Recession – is different.

The economists say that the Great Recession officially started in December 2007 because between then and now, we’ve lost more than 8 million jobs.

But, for lots of Americans the recession started even earlier. Even before December 2007, unemployment among Blacks and Hispanics and young people of all backgrounds was already high. For many people of color and young adults, pre-December 2007 was already a bad economic dream.

But in the Great Recession – with unemployment for African Americans at 16.5 percent, Hispanics at 12.6 percent, and teenagers at more than 26 percent – well, that bad dream has become a nightmare.

As we all know, unemployment, as defined conservatively by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was five percent in December 2007 but was almost double that last month. I use the term “conservatively” because the Bureau considers the unemployed technically to be only those Americans who have been actively looking for work in the past four weeks. So, if you have been searching for a job for a few months or even years but haven’t been searching in the last 4 weeks, or have given up looking entirely, you’re not counted in the official unemployment rate, even though you desperately want to work.

Where we really are is that almost 17% of working-age Americans – one of every six of us – twenty-six million of us – is either unemployed or underemployed.

These twenty-six million Americans include people we know and love. They are our neighbors and friends. They are our spouses, our brothers and sisters. They are our former co-workers.

They are our children, young adults who want to use their education and God-given talents to embark on a life of productive work, like their parents and grandparents did before them, but they feel that they just can’t get a fair start in doing so.

What’s so sad about that is that they are the next generation that’s going to lead this country, but they’re lagging behind in finding a job where they can gain skills and earn a decent income. Economists say this lag is one from which an entire generation of young people may never fully recover because even when new entrants get a job, if they get it during a recession, they are likely to experience depressed wages, not only during the recession but throughout their careers.

What’s also different about this recession is that not only are there many more of us who can’t find a job, but we have been looking for one a lot longer. Last month, almost one of every two of us had been looking for at least six months.

That’s bad for lots of reasons. The longer we’ve been without a job, the more likely we are to give up working altogether. Our skills are more likely to erode, and even when that doesn’t happen, employers are less likely to hire us as opposed to someone else because they think that are skills are gone.

We also have more health problems later in life, in part because of the stress and in part because we decided for financial reasons to put off those doctor’s visits.

There’s no question that in the Great Recession many more of us have been out of work and for much longer periods of time than we’ve seen in generations.

Last month, we did finally stop hemorrhaging jobs. For the first in more than two years we gained jobs – actually 162,000 of them. We know that’s not great news and that every day there’s a fight to protect the jobs that we have, including those of our brothers and sisters here in Houston and in Florida. But, a little bit of good news is better than none.

The fact remains, however, that last month, 26 million of us wanted to work but couldn’t.

To make this right, the bottom line is this: Over the next five years, to reach full employment, the economy will need to create a minimum of 20 million and as many as 25 million jobs. That’s 330,000 to 420,000 new jobs each and every month, more on average than were created during the boom years of the mid and late 1990s.

That’s going to be hard to do, especially given that the economists aren’t very optimistic about the near future. But, we don’t really need economists to tell us how bad things are. You see it and I see it, every day.

The banking system is still fragile and many more banks are going to fail this year and in coming years. Lending remains weak, which affects in particular small businesses, which are major engines of job growth.

Many more home foreclosures are expected, possibly more this year than even last year. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise given the millions of Americans who are unemployed and that sixty percent of mortgage defaults are caused by what? The fact that the defaulting homeowner doesn’t have a job.

Late Tuesday night I was watching CNN and my heart sank. We learned that as of that night, in the City of Chicago, since January 1st of this year, one hundred and thirteen people have been murdered, almost all of them children. One hundred and thirteen Americans – almost all children – killed by violence, in just one American city, in less than four months. That’s more than the number of people in our military who were killed fighting the enemy in Iraq during the same period of time.

Something is seriously wrong with that picture and if that doesn’t convince everyone in Washington and in state capitols across this country that we are in a serious crisis, I don’t know what will.

We can debate for hours the causes of this senseless violence but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that something is terribly wrong and that if more of our young people had jobs, some things would start to be made right.

We have to act, and we have to act NOW, especially because we’re hearing from entities like the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that if we stay at the status quo, the unemployment rate is going to remain high for years and may not get back to what it was in December 2007 until January 2016, six years from now.

You know and I know that this doesn’t have to be. We live in the greatest nation on earth and we are so much better than this. Everyone needs to stand up and fight, like you have been doing under the leadership of Tom Buffenbarger, and demand action. We need an effort not seen since the days of FDR to get Americans back to work.

We’ve got to re-new our commitment to a strong and comprehensive national industrial policy, investing in domestic manufacturing, research and development, and modernizing and rebuilding our nation’s critical infrastructure.  It makes so much sense to do this because it will not only create good jobs for people who don’t have them but it will make the quality of lives – our day to day living – better for all of us.

Even if we weren’t in the worst economic crisis in generations, investments here at home, particularly in our nation’s infrastructure, would be the right thing and the smart thing to do.

Countries around the world – including some of our toughest competitors – you know who they are – are building bullet trains, investing in 21 st Century public transit systems, modernizing and securing their ports, and they’re investing in alternative energy to make their environments cleaner while also reducing their dependence on foreign oil.

Yet, our infrastructure, which at one time was the envy of the world, is stretched, it’s aging, and, in some cases, it’s literally crumbling.

In 1968, more than four decades ago, we spent as much money in infrastructure as we do in real dollars today, even though our economy is now three times the size.

Some of you know that the American Society of Civil Engineers has since 1998 produced what they call a “report card” on the condition of our country’s infrastructure, assigning a grade to our roads, bridges, water systems and other parts of our critical infrastructure. The most recent report card, from just last year, is really bad. It’s one you’d never want your children to bring home because the average grade was a D.

Among lots of findings in the report was one about the condition of what are referred to as “high hazard” dams. These are dams, which, if they failed, would cause a significant risk to human life. So, this is a pretty big deal.

Yet, the number of high hazard dams in our country today now numbers in the thousands.

Because of lack of capacity and congestion on our major roads, we’re spending 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, wasting 2.9 billion gallons of fuel, and it’s costing the economy more than $78 billion dollars each year. Forty-five percent of major urban highways are congested and yet current annual spending is less than half of what we need to improve conditions.

Our national parks – our national treasures – are in dire need of help and face a $7 billion backlog in maintenance.

Unfortunately the lowest grades are given to some of the infrastructures that are the most fundamental and crucial to our ability to live healthy lives – our drinking water and sewage treatment facilities, both of which got a grade of D minus. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, leaking pipes lose an estimated seven billion gallons of clear drinking water a day, and there’s an annual shortfall of at least $11 billion to replace old facilities.

Aging wastewater systems are discharging billions of gallons of untreated wastewater into U.S. surface waters each year.

To deal with this issue, the American Society says we need to invest almost $400 billion over the next 20 years to update or replace the existing systems and to build new ones to meet what we all know will be increasing demand.

These are just a few facts that underscore the importance of our nation’s infrastructures to our quality of life. I don’t think they can be overstated. Whether it’s our drinking water or our waste water, or the condition of levees – which also by the way received a grade of D minus – our infrastructure really matters.

There’s no better example of that than what we experienced as a result of Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive and most costly natural disaster in our history.

But as important as our infrastructure is to our quality of life, there are few things more important to our economy and economic prosperity – other than the skills of our labor force – than our critical infrastructure.

As just one example, take our freight-transportation system. Today, in the United States, that system moves about 60 million tons of freight – worth about $40 billion dollars – each and every day.

Most of this freight moves by truck, typically handling more-expensive, time-sensitive freight over shorter distances while rail carries more bulk goods and intermodal shipping containers over longer distances. As you can imagine, when this system doesn’t run smoothly, manufacturing costs go up and the cost of retail goods goes up.

Our freight-transportation system is already strained and yet, trucking growth, by weight hauled, is expected to double by 2035. As to rails, the American Association of Railroads estimates that by that same year we’ll have a volume increase of 88 percent – almost double – more tonnage than we do now.

We must modernize our freight-transportation infrastructure for the future to make sure our economy is strong.

With respect to our bridges, there’s been improvement, but even with that improvement, still, more than one out of every four of our bridges is structurally deficient.

The issue doesn’t get much attention now but one issue that is important to me, particularly after having worked for a United States Senator from New York before, during and after the September 11th terrorist attacks, is the state of our nation’s homeland defense; our ability to prevent and respond to potential terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

We know that a robust and resilient critical infrastructure is central, for lots of reasons, to our national security. In talking about the need to improve our critical infrastructure, the Congressional Research Service noted in a recent report what many of us know, and that is that the national security community has been concerned for some time about the vulnerability of our critical infrastructure to both physical and cyber attacks.

The bottom line? The facts speak loudly and clearly as to the need – for our quality of life, our economic strength, and our national security – for substantial investments in our infrastructure.

The case is so strong, even in the absence of the greatest jobs crisis we have experienced since the Great Depression. But given that we are in such dire straights, given the need for millions of JOBS NOW – the call for major investments now, for our future, must be answered.

The American Society of Civil Engineers believes that we must spend more than $2 trillion over the next five years to meet existing critical infrastructure needs, but whatever we ultimately invest, the Society estimates that for every $1 billion dollars spent, we’ll create more than 17,000 jobs directly and, indirectly more than 23,000 jobs. The estimates by the Federal Highway Administration are even higher.

Many infrastructure projects are long-term but many can also be undertaken immediately and with short and long-term economic and societal benefits.

Just one case in point.

Thirty percent of all of our kids go to school every day in overcrowded classrooms, millions of them learning in temporary buildings because the main school structure is so overcrowded or decayed. Incredibly, this is happening at a time when the global competition our children and grandchildren are going to face will be greater than ever.

Although at least $127 billion would be needed to put all of the schools in very good condition, the Center for American Progress believes that for $20 billion we can still do an awful lot of good. We can relatively quickly make our kids’ schools a lot better while also creating thousands of good jobs.

These tasks I know may seem daunting – they are – but I believe we can get the job done if we as a country have the will to do it.

We can pay for the investments through a combination of the federal government’s direct spending, financing given historically low interest rates, including through tax-free bonds, and through what a number of folks have been talking about recently, which is the establishment of a National Infrastructure Bank.

This Infrastructure Bank would not replace existing ways to fund infrastructure projects but would rather supplement them. And it would address all kinds of infrastructure – from energy and water, to high-speed rail and our schools – as well as the needs of urban, rural and suburban areas.

It would be a non-partisan non-governmental entity that is run by infrastructure and good finance experts and it would provide a method for private capital to be included so that government spending at the federal, state, and local level would be maximized.

All the infrastructure projects would be subject to a strict cost-benefit analysis and the selection criteria would be merit-based and open to the public. It would also provide incentives to undertake multi-state efforts or regional efforts to address major transportation needs.

We have begun. President Obama has proposed in his Fiscal Year 2011 budget $4 billion for an infrastructure bank to fund or help finance transportation projects.

Now, the bi-partisan effort called Building America’s Future, led by Governors Rendell and Schwarzenegger and New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, has called for $5 billion each year over 5 years for a total of $25 billion. That’s obviously more than what is in the President’s proposal but his proposal nevertheless is a start. We know, however, that it’s still going to take the majority of members in Congress to support the President’s proposal for it to become a reality.

There is a desperate need and a hunger out there for these resources.

One and a half billion dollars in grants called the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery Grants – also known as “TIGER grants” – which were authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, are helping to fund some state and local transportation projects but TIGER grants are expected to be a one-shot, maybe a two-shot, deal.

Last year, the Department of Transportation received more than 1400 applications for a total of $57 billion dollars in grant requests, about 40 times the amount available through the program. Two months ago, in February, the Department announced the grant recipients. Fifty-one grants were awarded – out of 1400 applications – leaving more than 26 infrastructure projects behind for every one project funded.

We know this effort is not going to come cheap. It’s going to require major investments, but investments that are not only well worth it but investments that other countries, right now, are making in spades.

In recent years, the private sector has raised more than 100 billion dollars in dedicated infrastructure funds, but most of that money is being spent on infrastructure projects outside the United States. Europe, Japan and China have all used infrastructure banks. We’re still trying to get ours started.

China alone is spending $200 billion to improve upon and extend its railway system and hundreds of billions more are being spent building 150,000 miles of new roads and literally dozens of new airports.

China is also investing billions of dollars in clean energy, hoping that it will one day be the world’s leading exporter of wind, solar and other alternative energy products.

It looks to me like China is taking lessons from what we did to pull ourselves out the Great Depression, when we made unprecedented investments in our country, building our country for the 20th Century and hiring us, the American worker, to do it.

Countries that are seeking to exercise their economic muscle – like China – on this point – they totally get it, and so should we.

I hate to say it but in speaking truth to power, we need to borrow some lessons from China and look to our own history that speaks to the greatness of what we can achieve when we invest in America.

On January 4, 1935, President Roosevelt presented to Congress his plan for a federal public works program. That April, less than four months later – which by the way was seventy-five years ago this month – Congress authorized $4.9 billion in the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act of 1935 – the “ERA Act” – about $4 billion of which was directed to the activities of the new public works program. Though it grew over time, initially roughly $1.4 billion was allocated to the Works Progress Administration – the WPA – an agency that President Roosevelt actually established a month later, in May 1935, pursuant to an Executive Order and under the authority of the ERA Act.

The WPA was far from perfect, but it was nevertheless extraordinary. At its peak, the WPA employed almost forty percent of all unemployed Americans.

Between 1935 and the early 1940s, it spent a total of $11.4 billion – about $175 billion in today’s dollars – and put 8.5 million Americans to work.

American workers constructed 651,087 miles of roads, built or improved 124,031 bridges, created or upgraded 8,000 parks, laid 853 airport landing fields, and erected 125,110 public buildings – from the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, South Carolina to the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California.

Today, all across our country, we bear witness to the extraordinary work of those who labored during tough times to make the United States the economic powerhouse of the 20 th Century.

President Roosevelt had also proposed and Congress established the Civilian Conservation Corps, the purpose of which was to help single young men – primarily between the ages of 17 and 23 – to whom relief agencies didn’t direct their attention because these young men were not the primary earners in a family. Participants were provided with housing, clothing, health care, and a cash allowance. There are, as we know, some similarities between that program of 75 years ago and what we know today as Job Corps and Youth Conservation Corps.

During the nine years of the Civilian Conservation Corps, from 1933 to 1942, more than 3 million young men were employed, planting trees – 3 billion of them – and fighting forest fires. If you visit any National Park or forest, some of our finest national treasures, you are likely in the midst of beauty, seeds of which were planted 75 years ago.

In speaking of the lessons that FDR offers us today, historian and author David Kennedy has said that “[a]ll the major New Deal reforms that endured – the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Fair Labor Standards Act among them – had a common purpose: not simply to end the immediate crisis of the Depression but also to make America in the future a less risky place, to temper for generations thereafter what F.D.R. called the ‘hazards and vicissitudes’ of life.”

Today, millions of Americans are feeling like they are living in a risky place. We feel off balance and we have less faith in our institutions – financial, governmental, even faith based – than we have had in a very long time.

President Obama has taken major steps in averting the collapse of our entire financial system and in tempering the effects of the economic crisis, but much remains to be done.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a good start. It included aid to the unemployed, significant funding to state and local governments that enabled them to avoid laying off thousands of teachers, fire fighters, and police officers.

It had tax cuts for middle-class families, investments in infrastructure, like the TIGER grants I mentioned before, and investments in the green economy, which not only will help create jobs but will also help pave the way for long-term economic growth. The Recovery Act also saved or created 1.6 to 2 million jobs. But much more needs to be done.

As an analyst at the Center for American Progress has said, the Recovery Act “was scaled to douse a six-alarm fire, but it got poured onto a 10-alarm blaze.”

We must do so much more and we must begin to do it now. Yes, times are tough and money is tight and deficits are high, but there is no more important investment that we can make than to make one for, and in, the American people.

My home town is a great city called Buffalo; a city that has witnessed hard times in every decade of my 45 years, in many cases for reasons completely outside of the control of the people who live and work in Buffalo and, who, like me, are so proud to call it home.

I remember the late 1970s and early 1980s, when thousands of Western New Yorkers lost their jobs at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, NY, right outside Buffalo. In 1982 alone, more than 8,000 jobs at that one plant were lost.

At the time, New York State had a lot of problems – as it does now – but one of them was not its water supply. In the early 1980s, however, it became clear that both the supply and quality of water were being threatened by municipal water systems that were in many cases very old and in desperate need of repair. The cost to fix this was estimated to be as high as $10 billion, but at the time neither the federal government nor New York State provided significant aid to fund such projects, and so a local funding mechanism was needed.

Cities all across the state were confronting the problem, from those in Western New York to New York City. New York City’s problems alone were going to cost $3 billion to fix, Rochester $220 million. Smaller communities needed less but the need was nevertheless great because some of those communities were losing up to half of their drinking water through leaking pipes.

Someone came up with an idea of a Water Finance Authority that would act like a bank, issuing up to $4 billion in tax-exempt revenue bonds with the proceeds loaned for the water projects. It was also recognized that there should be a statewide water planning council because a state-wide water strategy was needed. Legislation was introduced in the state legislature by the Deputy Speaker of the New York State Assembly, a State Assemblyman from Buffalo. That man – Arthur Eve – is my father. His bill became law and when it did, it created at that time – almost 30 years ago – one of the largest infrastructure funding mechanisms in the world.

Thousands of New Yorkers went to work and dramatically improved the water infrastructure in cities across the state.

Yes, in case you hadn’t figured it out, I am very proud of my father, and my mother, who was, as a community college professor and community activist, an extraordinary public servant in her own right.

New York State faced then, and continues to face, tough times, but a call to action was made and because of my father’s leadership and his commitment to fight for the best interests of New York and because of the collective action of like-minded citizens who fought side-by-side with him, demanding action from their representatives, the call to action was answered.

One of my favorite quotes from President Roosevelt is in his July 24, 1933 Fireside Chat. He said: “I have no sympathy with the professional economists who insist that things must run their course and that human agencies can have no influence on economic ills. . . . But I do have faith, and retain faith, in the strength of common purpose, and in the strength of unified action by the American people.”

Times were tough in the Great Depression, and there were naysayers back then as there are now, but leadership and collective action not only brought us back from devastation but led to decades of economic opportunity and prosperity.

Times were tough in New York in the 70s and 80s, but leadership and the will to fight for what was right led to investments from which New Yorkers are benefiting today.

Times are tough now, but love for our country and respect for the American people require that we take bold action to address the most difficult challenges we have faced in a very long time.

Not everyone is going to agree with all of his decisions, but we have in President Obama a man I believe is trying to do the right thing for the American people, but no one man, or woman, can do it alone. Everyone needs to get on board to make sure the train leaves the station and gets to its destination.

I am proud to serve as the Vice President for Policy for the No Limits Foundation, a new organization that champions many of the issues my former boss, then Senator and now Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, has fought for all of her life. She is focused now on helping President Obama restore our standing around the world and keep us safe from harm but she has always understood that a safe and secure America is also an economically strong America.

We at No Limits are proud to join you in calling upon our leaders to do what must be done to get America back to work – not tomorrow, but today.

We stand with you in calling for a new and comprehensive industrial policy, one that includes retooling plants and retraining workers as part of the clean-energy transformation in our economy.

We join you in demanding significant investments in our nation’s infrastructure.

We, like you, demand that our nation answer the call of millions of Americans who are pleading, simply . . . Hire Us America.

We join you on behalf of the almost forty percent of African-American teenagers and thirty percent of Hispanic youth who can’t find a job and are crying out. . . Hire Us America.

And we stand with you in your unwavering commitment to help the thirty-eight thousand fellow machinists and aerospace workers who have lost their jobs and are ready to use their talents again to keep America economically strong. All we want for them, all they are saying is . . . Hire Us America.

These are tough times but I believe we will succeed because we have no choice; we must succeed. And because, as we at No Limits believe, with our ingenuity, innovative spirit, creativity and strength, there are no limits to what is possible in America.