Organizing for America | Seth Harris: Former Clinton Labor Officials Endorse Barack Obama

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Former Clinton Labor Officials Endorse Barack Obama

By Seth H. from New Jersey - Feb 21st, 2008 at 6:48 pm EST

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Please help us spread the word about this letter to your friends, union leaders, union brothers and sisters, other co-workers, and family members:

FORMER CLINTON ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS ENDORSE BARACK OBAMA

“Barack Obama is the best choice to restore the American Dream for working families.”

February 21, 2008

Dear Friends:

We were privileged to work for President Bill Clinton in senior appointed positions in the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the 1990s. We have great respect for President Clinton and Senator Clinton.

In 2008, however, we believe that Barack Obama is the best choice to restore the American Dream for working families. We support Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. We urge you to join us in voting or caucusing for Barack Obama.

Hope has been a rare commodity for America’s working families in recent years. The American Dream seems less and less achievable as more and more families face the threat of slipping out of the middle class. Job growth has been anemic throughout George W. Bush’s seven years in office, and it has ground to a halt in recent months. Real wages have stagnated. Forty-seven million people have no health insurance. Reliable, adequate pensions are increasingly rare. The stress of meeting the demands of work and family has grown for many adults who face the challenge of caring for their children and their parents at the same time.

Rather than shoring up the middle class’ crumbling foundations, the Bush Administration has weakened them further. Unions --- critical contributors to a strong and growing middle class --- have faced an unprecedented attack from the White House, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Labor Department. The Bush Administration has presided over irresponsible trade deals and massive tax giveaways that accelerate the export of American jobs. The Bush Labor Department launched an assault on overtime pay and continues to search for ways to weaken the Family and Medical Leave Act. Protections against workplace discrimination have been undermined by shrinking enforcement resources at the EEOC and the Labor Department, as well as anti-worker decisions by Bush’s appointees to the Supreme Court, lower federal courts, and the EEOC. Safety and health protections in workplaces and mines across the country are an afterthought.

In the face of difficult economic times and a hostile federal government, working families have been struggling to secure their place in the middle class and sustain their hope in the face of despair. Barack Obama has a plan to secure and expand the middle class and, perhaps more important, give working families reason to hope again. He plans to:

appoint leaders to the Labor Department, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who understand the struggles of working families and are fully committed to defending their rights, including the right to organize;
sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of his first term in office that lowers costs by up to $2,500 per family;
stand with workers fighting to organize unions;
create jobs by ending tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas, support new tax incentives for companies to create jobs in the United States, establish a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to create two million jobs fixing road and bridges, invest billions to create a green energy sector with millions of new jobs, and bring additional high-skilled manufacturing jobs to regions with workers and community that have past experience with manufacturing;
fight for fair trade that opens markets for American goods to create high-wage American jobs and negotiate trade agreements that spread progressive labor and environmental standards around the world;
fight to raise the minimum wage and index it to increase every year with the cost of living;
combat employment discrimination by working to overturn Supreme Court rulings that narrowed the Americans with Disabilities Act and curtailed workers’ ability to challenge pay discrimination, passing the Fair Pay Act to assure equal pay for equal work, passing the Genetics Information Nondiscrimination Act, and increasing funding for anti-discrimination enforcement at the EEOC and the Labor Department;
make college affordable for working families with a refundable tax credit up to $4,000 to cover tuition costs in return for a commitment to public service;
invest in workforce development and lifelong learning for workers, including expanding transition assistance for workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own;
strengthen Social Security and expand retirement security by automatically enrolling workers in portable retirement accounts and matching half of contributions up to $1,000 by families earning $75,000 or less per year;
help workers navigate work and family by expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act, supporting paid leave plans in every state, requiring employers to provide seven paid sick days to their workers, and protecting family caregivers against discrimination; and
reinvigorate the federal government’s role in ensuring that workplaces are safe and healthy by increasing funding for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

We urge you to go to www.BarackObama.com, click on the “Issues” tab, and then click on “Economy” and “Family” to learn more about Barack Obama’s specific plans to strengthen and expand the middle class.

Barack Obama understands the hopes and dreams of working families fighting to secure a better future for themselves and their children. Barack Obama was raised in modest circumstances by a single mother and his grandparents. As he has said many times, all he had growing up was love, hope, and education. He knows what it means to be denied health insurance: his own mother worried about whether her new health insurance policy would deny her coverage as she lay dying from cancer. We are firmly convinced that Barack Obama wants every child in the United States to have the same opportunity to succeed he had. We are equally convinced that Barack Obama’s example will give every child in America reason to hope that they can achieve their dreams.

Barack Obama understands that change will not be easy. He recognizes that we will not be able to improve the lot of working families unless we change our politics in Washington. Lobbyists will not set the agenda and buy up every chair at the table. For the first time in a long time, working families will have a voice in our nation’s policies. As a community organizer, a civil rights attorney, a state legislator, and a U.S. Senator, he has constantly reached beyond what divides us to forge a working majority for hope. He believes our nation’s best days lay ahead of us --- not behind us. He helps us believe in the American Dream. Barack Obama has the experience we must have in the next President of the United States of America.

We hope you will join us in supporting Barack Obama for President of the United States. Thank you very much.

Joseph Dear, Former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health,U.S. Department of Labor

John Donahue, Former Counselor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, and Former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy, U.S. Department of Labor

Fred Feinstein, Former General Counsel, National Labor Relations Board

Sarah Fox, Former Member, National Labor Relations Board

William Gould, Former Chairman, National Labor Relations Board

Seth Harris, Former Counselor to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, and Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy, U.S. Department of Labor

Harry Holzer, Former Chief Economist, U.S. Department of Labor

Paul Igasaki, Former Vice-Chair and Commissioner, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Charles Jeffress, Former Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, U.S. Department of Labor

Paul Steven Miller, Former Commissioner, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Former White House Liaison to the Disability Community

Edward Montgomery, Former Deputy Secretary of Labor, U.S. Department of Labor

Betsy Myers, Former Deputy Assistant to the President, and Former Director of Women’s Initiatives and Outreach, The White House

Shirley J. Wilcher, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Federal Contract Compliance (OFCCP), Employment Standards Administration, U.S. Department of Labor

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