Sen. Cantwell: Jobs are #1 priority

Several dozen local labor leaders met with Washington U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell April 6 in a wide-ranging half-hour long exchange at her offices in the Marshall House in the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

Cantwell has an 89 percent lifetime rating from the AFL-CIO. At the meeting she showed strong familiarity with labor’s issues, hitting the mark with talk of jobs as the number one priority. Clark County is officially at 14.5 percent unemployment, and Cantwell talked up several upcoming opportunities for federal infrastructure spending.

On the Employee Free Choice Act, a union-backed labor law reform that is stalled in the Senate, Cantwell said there’ve been discussions behind the scenes about when to proceed with it. Cantwell is signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill, which would make it easier for workers to unionize and get a first contract.

She spoke approvingly President Obama’s recent recess appointment of AFL-CIO associate general counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, and disapprovingly of the firing of teachers in Rhode Island. She praised AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka for keeping her informed.

Wall Street needs more regulation, Cantwell said; along with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Cantwell is sponsoring legislation that would reinstate the Glass-Steagall restrictions on mingling commercial and investment banking, which Congress lifted in 1999. She also faulted the 2000 passage of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which left derivatives unregulated, for the current financial crisis. She voted against the 2008 bank bailout known as TARP.

Asked if she would support a bill in Congress to give union pension funds more time to make up for the recent investment losses, she said “yes” without hesitation.

Labor’s only quarrel with Cantwell is her record on NAFTA-style trade agreements. She voted for NAFTA during her one term in the House, and in two Senate terms has voted for all NAFTA-style trade agreements that came up, including CAFTA, a treaty with five Central American nations and the Dominican Republic.

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