Obama says GOP is blocking construction jobs

Washington (PAI) —President Barack Obama says congressional obstructionism, courtesy of the GOP, is blocking jobs for construction workers – and everyone else.

To frequent cheers from 3,000 unionists, attending the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department’s legislative conference in D.C., the chief executive said the Republicans’ repeated answer to his jobs bills – for construction workers, teachers, fire fighters, police officers and anyone else – was “no.”

The naysayers are preventing the rebuilding of the economy and the middle class, he declared, by preventing construction workers, and other workers, from getting jobs.  And new workers’ spending would in turn produce even more jobs, he added.

But the GOP is so resistant to helping workers that it’s willing to let the U.S. fall behind in building and upgrading its roads, railroads and airports, taking a back seat in infrastructure spending to Europe and China, the president stated on April 30.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m chauvinistic.  I want the U.S. to have the best stuff” when it comes to transportation and infrastructure, he declared.

JOB CREATION

The president spent much of his speech explaining how the measures he had to force through Congress in the first two of his two-plus years in office helped draw the U.S. back from the worst crash since the Great Depression.

He noted that the result has been creation of 3.7 million jobs, an increase of 100,000 jobs in the auto industry, and 334,000 more factory jobs in the last two years.

In those latter two sectors, creation of more factory jobs also led to hiring of more construction workers, to refurbish plants, he said.

Obama’s campaign for more construction jobs comes against a continuing backdrop of high joblessness in the construction industry: 17.2 percent in March, more than double the national jobless rate of 8.2 percent.

It also comes as the Democratic-run Senate and GOP-run House start wrangling over a final version of a longer-term highway-mass transit spending bill.

The Senate approved a two-year $109 billion measure on a bipartisan 74-22 vote.  The House approved a barebones extension of the programs, with several controversial additions, by a party-line vote.  Obama had a few choice words about that conflict, too.

“Workers built our country and it’s time to rebuild our country,” the president declared.  “It’s time to take some of the money spent on wars”: in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he is winding down “and use half of it to pay down our debt and the other half to
rebuild our country.”  

He didn’t offer figures, but got a big cheer.

Obama said the GOP instead wants to cut taxes even more for the rich.  He pointed to $4.6 trillion –- “that’s trillion with a ‘T,’” he said – more in tax cuts for the wealthy advocated by the recent House GOP budget blueprint, approved on a party-line vote.

Obama said that contrasts with Republican votes against jobs bills, including jobs for construction workers.

“I believe the economy is strong when everyone is getting good wages like yours, when collective bargaining is protected, and when it’s not taken away by right to work laws – which might be called right-to-work-for-less laws,” such as the recent one enacted in GOP-run Indiana.