Editor’s Note: This article is a lightly edited transcript of a speech given by Howie Hawkins as the 2015 Green Party State of the Union Response on January 20, 2015. Howie Hawkins was the Green Party of the United States candidate for President in 2020. The signature issue of the campaign was the Hawkins-Walker Ecosocialist Green New Deal which included a federal budget proposal to fully fund and implement a Green New Deal. Hawkins first ran on the Green New Deal in his campaign for Governor of New York in 2010. The Green Party of the United States adopted the Green New Deal into its national platform in 2012, and adopted the Ecosocialist Green New Deal budget into its national platform in 2022. The Green Party has long advocated a Green New Deal, and this response shows how little has changed in the past decade – the Green Party’s Green New Deal is the only comprehensive policy proposal to address the climate emergency and economic crisis being sped up by Trump’s second term, and is needed more urgently than ever.
Good evening. I’m Howie Hawkins from Syracuse, New York. I was the Green Party candidate for Governor of New York in 2014.
President Obama’s State of the Union address comes as we are celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday. This would be an appropriate time for our federal government to honor King by finally enacting the Economic Bill of Rights he called for in his last campaign, the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968.
That Economic Bill of Rights called for:
- The right to a useful job at a livable wage for every adult willing and able to work.
- The right to a guaranteed minimum income above poverty for those who cannot or should not work.
- The right to affordable housing.
- The right to health care.
- And the right to a good education.
If President Obama were to call upon Congress to enact this Economic Bill of Rights he would not only be honoring Martin Luther King, he would also be renewing the call made by President Franklin Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address. Roosevelt called upon Congress to enact a “Second Bill of Rights,” the rights to jobs, living wages, incomes above poverty, affordable housing, guaranteed health care, and a good education.
Unfortunately, none of these rights are on the agenda of President Obama or either of the two major parties in America today. But they were part of the national policy debate from the 1930s through the 1970s.
In 1934, President Roosevelt formed a Committee on Economic Security, chaired by his Labor Secretary, Miss Frances Perkins, to come up with a comprehensive system of social insurance covering employment, income security, and health care.
For jobs, the Committee called for what they called “Employment Assurance,” the right to a job guaranteed by direct public employment in public works and services for those who could not find employment in the private sector. The Works Progress Administration, which employed 8.5 million different people in public works and services between 1935 and 1943, was the outcome. While it never intended to guarantee full employment, it did provide work for millions of unemployed people to build public infrastructure and provide public services during the Great Depression.
The major outcome of the Committee on Economic Security concerned income security. The 1935 Social Security Act provided income to the seniors, the unemployed, and families with dependent children. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act provided for a minimum wage. These programs have helped ameliorate poverty, but they have never eliminated it. Moreover, the federal guarantee of support for families with dependent children was repealed in 1996 under President Clinton’s and Speaker Gingrich’s government.
National health insurance, what we call a public single payer system today, was dropped to ease passage of the employment and income security programs.
President Roosevelt put health care as well as employment assurance back on the agenda with his call for a comprehensive system of social insurance in his 1944 State of the Union address. Guaranteed jobs, housing, and health care became part of the Democratic platform throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement gave added impetus to these demands on the national agenda at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in the 1966 Freedom Budget for All Americans, and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign.
But despite every Democratic president between Roosevelt and Obama having a majority in both houses of Congress for at least one election cycle, none of these rights have been secured. It has been over 80 years since Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security first called for these rights. It is past time to realize that the Democrats and Republicans are not going to enact legislation to secure these rights.
We need these economic rights. The private economy does not deliver economic security on its own.
The overwhelming majority of Americans do not have economic security. A recent survey by the Associated Press found that four out of five American adults struggle with unemployment, near-poverty or reliance on public assistance for at least parts of their lives.
The jobs crisis is severe and persistent. While the President touts a drop in the official unemployment rate to 5.6 percent, the real unemployment rate is at a Depression level 13.5 percent when we count involuntary part-time and discouraged workers who have given up looking, according to an analysis by the National Jobs for All Coalition.
That is 22 million people who want jobs. The only reason why the official unemployment rate is down is that the Labor Force Participation Rate by people aged 16 and over is down from a pre-recession 63 percent to 59 percent today. If the Labor Force Participation Rate were at its pre-recession level, the unemployment rate in December 2014 would have been over 9 percent instead of 5.6 percent.
The National Association of Counties just reported that 95 percent of county unemployment rates have not yet returned to levels before the Great Recession of 2008. 75 percent of counties have fewer jobs than they had before the Great Recession.
Our inner cities have suffered from Depression level unemployment and poverty levels without relief since manufacturing began its exodus to the suburbs in the 1950s and then overseas with the so-called free trade agreements of the 1990s.
Instead of direct public employment targeted for people who need jobs, all we get from the federal government are trickle-down programs that don’t trickle-down to the people who need the jobs, whether they are of the conservative supply-side tax break variety or the liberal Keynesian demand-side public spending variety of trickle-down economics.
The Green Party calls for a Green New Deal to provide direct public employment to employ unused labor to meet unmet community needs. The Green New Deal addresses the twin crises of unemployment and climate change. The Green New Deal is the Economic Bill of Rights that would be the fulfillment of the original New Deal, plus Green Energy to address the climate crisis.
Green energy would be a major job creator. One study of a scenario for transition to 100 percent clean energy for the U.S. by 2050 concludes that it would create 5 million 40-year construction jobs and 2.4 million 40-year operation jobs for the energy facilities, the combination of which would outweigh the 3.9 million jobs lost from old energy, for a net gain of 3.5 million 40-year jobs.
That still leaves about 18.5 million jobs needed to create full employment. There is plenty of work to do. Our schools need more teachers and teachers assistants to reduce class sizes. Our youth need staffed parks and community centers. Our elders need care. We need more primary health care providers. Our crumbling infrastructure for roads, rails, sewers, and water treatment need repair and upgrade.
We know how to provide public jobs. We have done it before. The Works Progress Administration provided 90 percent federal funding for locally-planned projects in public works and services, as well as jobs in federally planned projects.
We even have federal legislation drafted to provide for such a program, the Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act. Unfortunately, this bill introduced by Rep. John Conyers only had 15 co-sponsors in the last session of Congress.
We made some progress to ensure economic security between the 1930s and 1970s. But guaranteeing the right to a job has been off the national agenda since 1978, when the original Humphrey-Hawkins full employment bill was stripped of the job guarantee before passage at the urging of the Carter administration. Aside from its small powerless left fringe, the corporate-sponsored Democrats in Congress and the Presidency have not supported guaranteed full employment through direct public jobs for over 35 years.
So that leaves it up to the Greens to put the job guarantee back on the public agenda and to start electing Greens to Congress who are committed to that goal.
