The Half in Ten Campaign applauds the House of Representatives for passing the Jobs for Main Street Act of 2010 and calls on the Senate to follow suit by building on these efforts. The House bill represents a strong first step toward creating the kinds of jobs that will help the most vulnerable on Main Street to weather this recession and to participate in a shared economic recovery. Half in Ten thanks the House specifically for including programs that:
- Provide aid to states and localities to save jobs and prevent cuts to needed services such as health care and education.
- Maintain and create new public service jobs, which will be available to hard-hit communities. Half in Ten applauds in particular the investments in national service programs, summer youth employment, and job training for high-growth fields such as health care and clean energy.
- Provide relief to distressed communities, spurring economic demand that will ripple throughout the economy to create jobs. These provisions include unemployment insurance and health care for the unemployed, improvements to the child tax credit, the income tax refund disregard, and funding to prevent a drop in the federal poverty measure, a threshold used to determine eligibility for many critical services.
- Create private-sector jobs that meet needs by investing in the National Housing Trust Fund and public housing construction.
The Jobs for Main Street Act is a critical first step toward addressing this long-term challenge. The jobs created through this bill will create pathways to long-term careers with living wages, invest in services that strengthen families and communities, and ensure that those traditionally left behind have the opportunity to participate in economic recovery, including communities of color, people with disabilities, single mothers, and residents of urban or rural communities with high concentrations of poverty.
Yet even as the economy turns the corner, economists are predicting prolonged periods of high unemployment. The Half in Ten Campaign therefore urges the Senate to build on the House’s strong efforts with a year-long extension of unemployment and COBRA benefits, and additional investments in job-creation policies that will lift up workers in hard-hit communities.
A strategy to create decent-wage jobs and ensure that low-income workers have the opportunity to access them will be at the heart of both comprehensive poverty reduction efforts and rebuilding our economy to ensure shared prosperity for all. Half in Ten looks forward to working with Congress and the Obama administration to promote job creation that reflects these principles.
The Half in Ten Campaign is a collaboration of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Coalition on Human Needs.