Many people have compared Biden’s ambitious American Jobs Plan to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Republicans currently serving in Congress have balked at the Plan’s two trillion dollar price tag. In giving his party’s response to Biden’s plan, Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina dismissed it as a “liberal Wishlist of big government waste.”
Biden has been meeting with Republican Senators to hear their concerns and to see if they can work toward a compromise. But at the same time, he has instructed five members of his Cabinet – Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh – to get out and promote his plan to the American public.
Note that Walsh is the first Labor Secretary in decades to come from a solid union background. In the earliest years of the Labor Department, the men appointed to helm the agency had actually been full-time workers as children. One was only eight when he began working as a puddler’s assistant on the floor of a steel mill. Another started work at the age of nine as a breaker boy in a Pennsylvania coal mine. But more recent Labor Secretaries have tended to come from white collar careers in law or business.
Marty Walsh grew up in Massachusetts in the 1970s, the son of Irish immigrants. Thanks to Frances Perkins, of course, child labor was a thing of the past, but Walsh had his own challenges as a kid, dealing with a four-year bout of cancer, and having to play catch-up in school After graduating high school and college, Walsh joined Laborers’ Union Local 223 at the age of 21. His career ever since has been focused on organized labor with a side of politics – he’s also served as a state legislator and as the Mayor of Boston.
By choosing a longtime union member to head the Department of Labor, Biden is signaling his belief in the key role organized labor will play in helping America Build Back Better. More than any of his Oval Office predecessors in recent memory, this President has been outspoken in advocating for the strengthening of public and private sector unions.
The White House Fact Sheet for his American Jobs Plan clearly spells out his aim to “create good-quality jobs that pay prevailing wages in safe and healthy workplaces while ensuring workers have a free and fair choice to organize, join a union, and bargain collectively with their employers.”
Shortly after unveiling his American Jobs Plan earlier this spring, Biden himself went to Pittsburgh to talk up the plan to a carpenter’s union.
He noted that while millions of Americans lost their jobs during the pandemic last year, the wealthiest one percent of Americans saw their net worth increase by $4 trillion.
That’s no way to run America, Biden told the crowd. He wants to fund his Jobs Plan by increasing the corporate tax rate to 28 percent and closing loopholes that have allowed U.S. companies to paying any taxes at all.
“We all will do better when we all do well,” the President said. “It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top down.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest.