Union takes job talk on road

By Brian Tumulty
Gannett News Service

Dawn Teo, founder of Rescue American Jobs, will be one of the speakers on the AFL-CIO Show Us the Jobs tour. Gannett News Service

The circuitous 18-city route kicks off tomorrow in St. Louis and ends a week later in Washington. But it won't be mistaken for the first of two Jobs and Growth bus tours by three of Bush's Cabinet secretaries that covered some of the same interstates in July in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

In contrast to the administration's effort to promote tax cuts and free trade as the nation's ticket to a better future, the labor federation will talk about the 2.2 million jobs that have been lost since Bush took office.

"This is not a direct response to their bus tours, but it is certainly an alternative story," AFL-CIO spokeswoman Denise Mitchell said. "They went out and they tried to cover up the jobs crisis. We are going out so that people see the human faces and human stories."

Money for the ambitious bus trek is coming from the $44 million the labor federation will spend this year on political campaigns and mobilization of its 13.1 million members.

A spokesman for Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who participated in both Jobs and Growth tours, said that the recent news about the job market is good.

"No amount of partisan political rhetoric can contradict the fact that this economy is growing stronger every day," said Chao's spokesman, Ed Frank.

"Hundreds of thousands of Americans have found good jobs in the past few months, new unemployment claims are at the lowest level since January 2001 and the unemployment rate is below the averages of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s."

Both sides are correct.

Although the nation has lost 2.2 million payroll jobs since Bush took office, that number is smaller than it was this past summer.

In the past six months, payroll employment has climbed by 364,000. The downside is that the average monthly increase of 61,000 jobs is only half the rate needed to stay even with a growing work force.

February's jobless rate of 5.6 percent is low by historical standards and has been on the decline, in large part because many workers have stopped looking for jobs.

The AFL-CIO bus trip will focus on issues other than unemployment. Many of the 51 workers from every state and the District of Columbia who will be ambassadors of woe now have jobs:

• John Greene, a 54-year-old Republican town councilman from Endicott, N.Y., works as a salesman at a sporting goods store. "I've never been unemployed, but I've witnessed the devastating effects of downsizing," said Greene, who plans to talk about the effect of factory closings on his hometown.
• Dawn Teo, 33, of Mesa, Ariz., operates a small business with her husband that makes parts for racing cars. She founded Rescue American Jobs last summer after she saw employers repeatedly offer her Chinese-American husband, Adrian, low wages to work as an engineer. They thought he was in the United States on an H1-B work visa. "When he told them he didn't need a visa, they would pull the job offer," Teo said. "We've seen foreign guest workers who work 16- or 18-hour days because they are afraid they will be deported. We are exploiting people right here on our own soil."
• Ron Larson, 57, of the Milwaukee area, works as a $14-an-hour home inspector, but he's an independent contractor with no health benefits or retirement plan. "It's not bad, but you don't often get 40 hours a week," Larson said. "It's usually between 28 and 36 hours." Larson has had a succession of temporary jobs and bouts of unemployment that forced him to withdraw all but $500 of the $240,000 he had accumulated in an Individual Retirement Account. He just refinanced his house with a new 30-year mortgage that won't be paid off until he's 87.