As the calendar flips towards hurricane season, communities along the coasts are getting ready to tackle dangerous storms and surging flood waters. Yet while many are thinking of ways to make their community safer and stronger, the usual suspects are preparing to use these natural disasters as an excuse to trot out the same tired, […]
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More than a month after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the situation remains dire. Forty percent of the island is without running water. Many roads and bridges are impassable. The electric grid is largely offline. The people of Puerto Rico desperately need and are entitled to help from the U.S. government. But instead of acting […]
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By Larry I. Willis
For hardworking members of the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association (M.E.B.A.), the reflagging of a vessel to U.S. registry by the New York-based commercial shipping company, Liberty Maritime Corp/Liberty Global Logistics (Liberty), should be a happy occasion. It should mean good jobs and wages for members of America’s oldest maritime labor union. But thanks to a […]
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By Ed Wytkind
In recent years, Congress has generated bad ideas with such regularity that the shock value has diminished. But the latest proposal from Senator John McCain still packs a wallop. With the U.S. economy creating jobs at the fastest pace in 15 years, Senator McCain apparently believes that we can afford to lose close to half […]
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By Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO
America’s transportation systems suffered several casualties as some politicians decided a couple of weeks ago that they would rather shut down our government than keep America moving. One of those was House floor action on the Water Resources Reform and Development Act (WRRDA), a bill critical to keeping our nation’s waterways flowing with trade, maintaining […]
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By Ed Wytkind
There’s plenty of disagreement in Washington over the role of government. For me, “more or less” isn’t the question. What interests me is smart government. Don’t we all want smart policies that keep us strong and competitive? Maritime cargo preference laws help us do that and they need to be strengthened, not undermined. Our cargo […]
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By Ed Wytkind
Imagine that the government was sitting on a pile of money – billions, actually – that had been collected for a purpose that is critical to maintaining our nation’s standing in the global economy. Now consider that, if this money were put to the use for which it was collected, it would create middle-class jobs […]
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By Ed Wytkind
What happened this week on the West Coast with longshore workers is a testament to why unity works when employers pursue sinister agendas. Southern California union members stood up against a powerful shipping industry to protect good jobs from being outsourced, and won. These clerical workers represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s (ILWU) […]
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By Ed Wytkind
As the fiscal cliff looms, it is becoming nauseating to listen to extremist political operatives and special interest lobbyists argue we should hurt working people, the sick and elderly to ensure the super-rich don’t pay their fair share of the tax burden. Someone should tell the special interests who coddle millionaires at everyone else’s expense […]
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By Ed Wytkind
“Too many in Washington are fixated on cutting public spending to balance the budget, not on how to put people back to work and get our economy moving.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. These are the words of 350 leading economists who offer our political leaders a solution to our anemic economy at […]
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