Opinion: Mr. President, We Need a Real Jobs Program

(Sept. 9) -- Over the past year, the unemployment rate has hardly budged, now hovering at 9.6 percent, which translates to 14.6 million people who want to work but can't find jobs, with another 8.5 million who are working part time but want and need full-time jobs. And then there is the huge uncounted number who have simply given up looking for work. Economists and labor experts are calling our faltering economy a "jobless recovery" or, even more cynically, the "new normal."

But whatever name you give it, it's an unrelenting disaster. And the Obama administration's continued pleas for patience as it ticks off various initiatives -- including a few news ones this week -- put forward to get people back to work is sounding like a bad joke to the millions of Americans who've experienced nothing but loss in this stunning downturn.

We need a jobs program, one that's serious, bold and aims to rapidly make a major dent in unemployment -- a program that we don't have now.

Properly done, it can address some of our country's most urgent needs, like rebuilding our aging infrastructure and developing assets necessary for a brighter future -- such as greatly expanded "green" industries, including large-scale clean energy production. There's no shortage of ideas. Most importantly, this program must quickly begin to reintegrate the millions of American workers who were pushed out of the labor market through no fault of their own.

At his Labor Day speech and his talk Wednesday, President Barack Obama started to talk the talk. Now we need him to deliver on his words. Rhetoric alone won't put anyone to work.

We've done this before. Robert Sherwood's biography, "Roosevelt and Hopkins," recounts how Harry Hopkins, FDR's right hand, set up the Civil Works Administration on Nov. 9, 1933. By Christmas of that same year the CWA had put 2.6 million Americans to work. The program kept expanding to encompass 4.3 million workers, and paved 225,000 miles of roads, built or improved 40,000 schools, and put 50,000 teachers and 3,000 artists on the payroll. That was when our country's population totaled only 125 million.

No doubt the circumstances are different now but, if the will is there, we can move mountains. We've done it before.

A Congress that had to struggle mightily to extend unemployment benefits may recoil in horror at the idea of a massive jobs program, especially as we head into the November elections with Republicans and some conservative Democrats centering their campaigns on cutting "out-of-control" government spending.

Yet, at the end of the day, it's our government that failed us, and only the government has the tools to make things right. A real effort to do so would put a bright light on our fellow Americans who need our country's help to restart their lives -- and it would show a big-hearted compassion missing in the pronouncements of both political parties.

What we don't need is a politically calculating administration proposing programs that it knows won't be enacted, that are a ploy to pressure the opposition, but nothing else. It would be posturing at its most cynical, at a time when we need the administration to act -- to walk the walk.

We've had enough talk.

Jack Connelly led Jobs for Youth/Chicago, a nonprofit helping more than 15,000 inner-city youth find and keep good jobs, for 20 years.