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Monday, July 13, 2009

Labor Leaders push Obama for Second Stimulus

n a meeting with President Obama today at the White House, top labor leaders pushed for a second stimulus package to create more jobs.

“Since the onset of the recession, this country has lost an astounding 6.5 million jobs and $14 trillion in wealth. We support the President's recovery and reinvestment program, and we believe it should be substantially reinforced with more stimulus, creating millions of good jobs that cannot be outsourced,” the National Labor Coordinating Committee (NLCC) said in a statement after the meeting.

A labor official said Obama did not commit to any future stimulus package.

The president met for approximately an hour this afternoon with more than a dozen labor leaders, including AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, SEIU President Andy Stern and Change to Win Chair Anna Burger.

Obama used his weekly address last Saturday to quell the calls for a second stimulus bill and said the Recovery Act “has worked as intended.”

“As I made clear at the time it was passed, the Recovery Act was not designed to work in four months – it was designed to work over two years,” he said in the address. “We must let it work the way it’s supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity.” - ABC News Story

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