Newark Jobs Protest; AFL-CIO's Trumka Challenges Obama on Jobs Crisis 28:38

Newark Activists In Fifty-Fourth Day Of Protest Calling on U.S. Government To Institute Jobs Program
with Larry Hamm, Chairman, People's Organization for Progress, Newark, N.J.

The U.S. economy is struggling, but in many black communities Americans
are in the throes of a depression. With unemployment exacting an outsize
toll on African-American men and women, a coalition of community groups
sees it as a crucial civil rights issue emerging from the country’s economic
woe. "We are more than a half-century away from the Montgomery bus
boycott, but we are dealing with issues just as pressing," said Larry Hamm,
chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress. Flanking a statue of
Abraham Lincoln outside the Essex County Courthouse, Hamm and like-
minded activists started a 381-day protest modeled after one of the most
famous battles of the Civil Rights era — the Montgomery bus boycott in
1955-56. They are calling on President Obama and Congress to institute
a jobs program akin to the Works Progress Administration of the Great
Depression, that employed millions of unskilled Americans in public works
jobs. Unemployment is 16 percent among black Americans, a rate rivaling
those of the 1930s. New Jersey’s jobless rate is 9.5 percent, while the
national rate is 9.1 percent.
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AFL-CIO Pres. Trumka:
History Will Judge Pres. Obama If He 'Nibbles' at the Jobs Crisis

At a recent forum sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, AFL-CIO's.
Richard Trumka urged President Obama to “propose bold solutions on the
jobs crisis,” and not nibble around the edge of the issue and that, “history
will judge him and I think working people will judge him. on what he
proposes on the jobs crisis. Trumka said that, in a conversation with
Pres. Obama “I urged him to propose what was necessary to solve the
problem” as opposed to what the president thought was politically possible
given Republican control of the House of Representatives. Mr. Trumka
added, “I said to him,'Do not look at what is possible, look at what is
necessary. The American public wants solutions and just because [of] the Republicans, you think this is the only thing that is politically possible, that
doesn’t mean you should propose that. That means they control the agenda.' ”

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