Sweeney: American Job Slaughter is Being Ignored

At a National Press Club speech this week, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney posed the question, "What if President Bush told the American people the truth?" about the economy, saying the "senseless slaughter" of good American jobs is the most critical challenge facing the United States today.

The job loss is "at the core of a corporate-driven strategy to compete in the global marketplace by degrading work and workers, rather than competing through ingenuity," competing through privatization, deregulation and de-unionization, rather than by innovation," Sweeney said at the Washington, D.C. event Jan. 18.

Noting heated disagreements about the Iraq war, court appointments, corporate corruption and more, he said America is "facing a question of even greater magnitude that is being ignored by leaders of one party and avoided by leaders of the other."

"That question is: What are we going to do about the destruction of good jobs in our country - the jobs that for the past half century helped us create the largest middle class, the most dynamic economy and the strongest democracy in the history of the world?"

He cautioned that Bush will undoubtedly paint a rosy picture of the economy in his State of the Union speech Jan. 31. The truth, in contrast, "would involve admitting that we are barely creating enough new jobs to match the growth in our workforce - and, increasingly, the jobs we are generating are dead-end alleys. Our trade policies have translated into over 2 million lost manufacturing jobs, our debt to other countries is rising by more than $1 million a minute and almost $700 billion in U.S. Treasury notes are held by China alone."