2008 in Review: Remember January, With a Jobless Rate of 5 Percent? (Jan-Feb)

[Omaha Steve]

by Mike Hall, Dec 27, 2008

It was a classic “Good News-Bad News Year” for working families in 2008. First, the good news. Working families mobilized to Turn Around America and gave a pink slip to McBush, electing Barack Obama and ending eight years of the most anti-worker administration in U.S. history.

Now, the bad news. Millions of workers got their own pink slips as the Bush economy tumbled even faster toward disaster. In between, the Employee Free Choice Act gained momentum, health care reform jumped to the forefront in the public debate and workers continued to fight anti-worker employers and weak labor laws to form unions and bargain for a better life.

Here’s the first of a six-part AFL-CIO Now blog series on the year that was.

January-February



In what became a month-by-month flood of bad economic news, the first unemployment report of the year showed the jobless rate jumping to 5 percent—at the time, the highest level in two years. But the worst was to come. A month later, news came that for the first time in four years, the economy lost jobs—17,000 of them. That first wave of job loss was a tsunami by year’s end.

With the economy’s downhill ride gaining speed, the AFL-CIO proposed a five-point economic-recovery plan to turn it around. President Bush and congressional Republicans blocked the sweeping stimulus package, even denying aid to the growing number of jobless.

In a rare bit of good economic news—the result of a 2006 and 2007 mobilization by the AFL-CIO and other groups to raise state minimum wages—low-wage worker in 14 states got a pay raise Jan 1.

Way back when the 2008 election campaign was just beginning, working families and their unions played big roles in the Iowa caucus, in the New Hampshire, Michigan and Florida primaries and on Super Tuesday. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) took the lead in the Democratic race. On the Republican side, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani faded from the race as the Fire Fighters (IAFF) punctured his overblown 9/11 leadership claims. Mitt Romney quit the race as Sen. John McCain took the GOP lead.

FULL story at link.