AFL-CIO, SEIU leaders take off gloves in Solis fight

Original source: After keeping a low profile while GOP legislators blocked Obama’s Labor Secretary nominee Hilda Solis because of her support of the Employee Free Choice Act, top labor leaders today came out swinging. The right-wing has seized on the newly revealed tax problems of her husband and her unpaid, ceremonial position with a pro-union organization, American Rights at Work, claiming a conflict of interest.

Yesterday, an AFL-CIO official told the The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein:

‘Enough is enough, the gloves are coming off on Friday. Labor, women’s groups, Hispanic groups are opening fire. We worked with Republicans in good faith. Hilda Solis has answered all their questions but they continue to oppose her for partisan ideological reasons.’

Today they kept their word. After union officials were urged for weeks to keep relatively quiet by the White House as the Obama administration pursued the Solis nomination, both Andy Stern, president of SEIU, and John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, lashed out at GOP obstructionism. Sweeney proclaimed:

We cannot continue to fiddle as the economy burns. It is urgent for the American people to have an aggressive, emergency economic recovery plan that will put people back to work and keep families in their homes, and a strong Department of Labor

Today’s job losses show that we are staring down the barrel of a gun of a long-term economic crisis: 598,000 jobs were lost just this month, the worst monthly job loss since 1974; we lost 207,000 manufacturing jobs, the largest one-month decline since 1982; and we lost 3.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007 – almost half of those just in the last three months.