H.R. 1041 (ih) To amend the Solid Waste Disposal Act to provide grants to States to stabilize and remove large tire piles that are near drinking water sources and sensitive populations. ...

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108th CONGRESS
  1st Session
                                H. R. 1040

To establish a living wage, jobs for all policy for all peoples in the 
       United States and its territories, and for other purposes.


_______________________________________________________________________


                    IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                           February 27, 2003

   Ms. Lee introduced the following bill; which was referred to the 
   Committee on Education and the Workforce, and in addition to the 
Committees on the Budget, Armed Services, and Rules, for a period to be 
subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration 
  of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee 
                               concerned

_______________________________________________________________________

                                 A BILL


 
To establish a living wage, jobs for all policy for all peoples in the 
       United States and its territories, and for other purposes.

    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.

    (a) Short Title.--This Act may be cited as the ``A Living Wage, 
Jobs For All Act''.
    (b) Table of Contents.--The table of contents is as follows:

Sec. 1. Short title; table of contents.
Sec. 2. Findings and declaration of policy.
Sec. 3. Basic rights and responsibilities.
Sec. 4. Overall planning for full employment.
Sec. 5. Joint Economic Committee.
Sec. 6. Authorization of appropriations.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS AND DECLARATION OF POLICY.

    (a) Findings.--The Congress finds the following:
            (1) Uneven progress.--(A) In recent years the income and 
        wealth gaps among individuals in the United States have 
        expanded.
            (B) Many individuals have become rich or richer, poor 
        individuals have become more numerous, and many individuals 
        depend on two jobs.
            (C) Localized mass depression appears in the midst of elite 
        opulence, unmet basic needs exist in the midst of unused labor, 
        and there is massive insecurity in the United States despite 
        large-scale military spending.
            (D) Although unused labor exists in the United States, 
        unmet basic needs exist in repairing and improving the 
        infrastructure of the Nation, including private industry, 
        farming, agriculture, public facilities, public utilities, and 
        human services, with special emphasis on the availability of 
        good and affordable education, quality child care, health 
        promotion services, housing, artistic cultural activities, and 
        basic as well as applied research and development.
            (E) While some individuals enjoy the best health services 
        in the world, many other individuals are without health care or 
        have inadequate or overly expensive health services.
            (F) While many individuals enjoy higher life and activity 
        expectancy, poor individuals suffer lower levels of life 
        expectancy and higher levels of infant mortality and infectious 
        disease, factors that are aggravated by race.
            (G) Some individuals live in safe neighborhoods with good 
        housing and public facilities while many others live in bad or 
        over-crowded housing in dangerous neighborhoods without 
        adequate recreational, educational, library, energy, or public 
        transportation facilities.
            (H) Uncounted individuals, including children, are 
        homeless.
            (I) The entire country benefits from the education provided 
        by many of the best universities in the world, while suffering 
        from some of the worst high school education in the industrial 
        world.
            (J) Despite the existence of efficient technologies for 
        improving the environment, all individuals suffer directly or 
        indirectly from dangerous levels of air, water, and soil 
        pollution, especially agricultural workers.
            (K) Despite discrimination against immigrants and their 
        children, the United States is still the preferred haven of 
        refuge for victims of oppression in other countries.
            (2) Insecure people.--(A) Although about 10,000,000 new 
        jobs have been created in the United States economy between 
        1993 and 1996, there are nearly 17,000,000 individuals who want 
        jobs and do not have them or are forced to work part-time 
        because they cannot find full-time employment.
            (B) Millions of individuals face the threat of downsizing 
        as the result of mergers, plant closings, or higher labor 
        productivity.
            (C) New jobs increasingly come at lower wage levels or with 
        few, eroding, or no benefits.
            (D) So-called welfare reform is increasing the number of 
        job-seekers but not the number of living wage job 
        opportunities.
            (3) Job-based military spending.--(A) Billions of dollars 
        are being spent annually on military programs that have been 
        and are justified less by strategic and tactical military needs 
        than by--
                    (i) the jobs they create; and
                    (ii) the economic health of communities that have 
                become dependent upon the maintenance or expansion of 
                such programs.
            (B) Careful termination of such contracts, with appropriate 
        protection for workers, contractors, subcontractors, and 
        communities could release resources for activities to meet 
        unmet human needs while advancing the civilian economy.
            (4) Entitlement confusions.--(A)(i) Among the recipients of 
        corporate welfare, some individuals have been enlarging their 
        collective entitlements.
            (ii) This has been done through tax deductions, Government 
        guaranteed loans, price supports, military contracts and other 
        forms of direct or indirect subsidy.
            (B)(i) Other individuals have swelled personal entitlements 
        at the expense of taxpayers, shareholders, employees and local 
        communities.
            (ii) This has been done through unprecedented increases in 
        salaries, stock options, deferred compensation, and other 
        luxurious benefits.
            (C) Some beneficiaries of elite entitlements have been 
        supporting attacks on the rights and entitlements of working 
        people, the elderly, racial or ethnic minorities, the jobless, 
        the homeless, poor people, the disabled, welfare parents, and 
        immigrants.
            (D) Others have been undermining collective bargaining 
        rights through anti-union propaganda, trade promotion 
        authority, subcontracting to non-unionized companies, and plant 
        closings.
            (E) Funds now deposited into the Social Security Trust Fund 
        are enormously attractive to those who would like to divert the 
        people's savings from secure Government bonds into the risk-
        laden stock and bond markets.
            (5) Defective growth.--(A) Recent economic growth has been 
        below the levels needed to provide decent employment for a 
        larger and more productive population.
            (B) As a result, many individuals have been forced into 
        jobs that are underpaid, part-time, temporary, irregular, or 
        lacking in health insurance or other social benefits.
            (C) Many face the disappearance of career ladders and an 
        ever-present specter of lay-offs.
            (D) Consumer debt and business bankruptcy have been 
        reaching historic levels.
            (E) These trends have created deeper and longer term 
        poverty or insecurity, with the consequent loss of personal 
        dignity and self-respect.
            (F) Among the more obvious symptoms are the fostering of 
        mental depression, family breakdown, child or spousal abuse, 
        and illegal forms of income.
            (G) Lesser known symptoms have been the increase in the 
        prison population, the exploitation of prison labor, the spread 
        of new hate groups, church bombings, homophobia, and 
        unregulated armed militias.
            (H) As a result, an insecurity plague unravels the social 
        fabric of United States society.
            (6) Misleading information.--(A) While most individuals are 
        flooded by information overloads, much of the information they 
        receive consists of oversimplifications, misinformation or 
        disinformation.
            (B) By themselves, aggregate measures of national output or 
        income neglect their disaggregated components, overemphasize 
        monetary data, ignore the entire world of unpaid volunteer and 
        household elderly and healthcare services and care for 
        children.
            (C) Their use tends to nurture the misleading idea that 
        human progress or regress can be represented by a single 
        overall measurement.
            (D) Statistical data on employment, unemployment, prices, 
        education, crime, and health are often based on outmoded 
        concepts that have not been adapted to changing conditions or 
        new capabilities for information collection, processing, and 
        distribution.
            (E) Many people misuse averages and other measures of 
        central tendency without attention to frequency distributions 
        and other measures of dispersion. The use of a single measure 
        of consumer prices and inflation ignores the long-established 
        fact that poor individuals pay more.
            (7) Lost legacies.--(A) Few people now remember, and many 
        young people never learned, how President Franklin D. Roosevelt 
        started planning for conversion from war to peace by 
        proclaiming a ``second Bill of Rights''.
            (B) The first principle in this long-forgotten document was 
        ``the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries 
        or shops or farms or mines of the Nation''.
            (C) This right was backed up with seven other human rights: 
        adequate income, adequate medical care, family farming, freedom 
        from monopolies, decent housing, Social Security, and a good 
        education.
            (D) These ideals led to law-based entitlements that 
        nurtured high wages, a successful Social Security system, 
        unemployment insurance, other social benefits, collective 
        bargaining, higher productivity and the rising purchasing power 
        needed for private enterprises to earn profits without 
        Government subsidy.
            (8) Limitations in mainstream discourse.--(A) During World 
        War II and the subsequent conversion from war to peace, the 
        idea of full employment was widely held.
            (B) The United States made a commitment to promote full 
        employment when it ratified the United Nations Charter, 
        including a commitment to adhere to articles 55(a) and 56 of 
        that treaty.
            (C) More recently, the full employment ideal has been 
        mistakenly defined as a high level of unused labor or regarded 
        as impossible without excessive deficits, inflation or 
        regulations.
            (D) Discussion of full employment has thus become taboo in 
        mainstream discourse.
            (E) Something similar has happened with the ideal of decent 
        job opportunities as a human right.
            (F) In earlier decades this ideal was supported by most 
        religious leaders and articulated, under United States 
        leadership, in the United Nations Charter and in other United 
        Nations treaties and declarations.
            (G) More recently, the idea of full employment has also 
        become taboo in mainstream economic discourse.
            (9) Globalization.--(A) Transnational corporations have 
        evolved into giant global institutions that control much of the 
        world's information, assets and money, while often undermining, 
        if not entirely escaping, national and international defenses 
        against the violation of the right to dignity and all basic 
        human rights and responsibilities.
            (B) One-third of world trade is transactions among the 
        various units or sub-units of the same organization.
            (C) An excessive amount of global financial transactions 
        consists of speculative operations that create no new wealth 
        and thereby divert resources from productive use.
    (b) Declaration of Policy.--To help promote the general welfare and 
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, the 
Congress hereby declares the following to be the policy of the Federal 
Government:
            (1) Reaffirming basic rights.--To reaffirm to public 
        discourse the human rights proclaimed by President Roosevelt 
        more than half a century earlier, express them in terms that 
        have been developed in more recent years and, as part of the 
        bridges to the twenty-first century, affirm basic rights 
        regarding dignity, personal security, collective bargaining, 
        the environment, information, and voting.
            (2) More emphasis on basic responsibilities.--(A) To help 
        root these ideals of living wage jobs for all individuals in 
        explicit recognition of personal, corporate, and Federal 
        responsibilities.
            (B) These include the continuing responsibility of 
        government of the following:
                    (i) To protect the rights of individuals.
                    (ii) To nurture healthy partnerships among Federal, 
                State, county, and local government agencies, and 
                between government agencies and such private sectors as 
                nonprofit enterprises, labor unions, trade or fraternal 
                associations, religious groups, and cooperatives.
                    (iii) To update and continuously improve such 
                fundamental laws and procedures as are required for the 
                protection of private property, the functioning of 
                public utilities, competitive markets, and such 
                limitations on market activities as are necessary to 
                promote the common good by protecting employees, 
                consumers, and the environment.
            (3) Overall democratic planning.--To mandate under law an 
        overall planning process of legislative and executive action to 
        help provide the essential remedies and resources needed to 
        attain and maintain conditions under which all Americans may 
        freely fulfill basic human rights and responsibilities, 
        including the right to dignity and to help reduce poverty, 
        inequality, and the concentrations of economic and political 
        power.
            (4) Congressional monitoring and initiatives.--To 
        strengthen the constitutional checks and balances by providing 
        continual congressional monitoring of the overall planning 
        process through the activities of the Joint Economic Committee 
        and the requirement of open debate and voting on the Annual 
        Economic Policy Resolution.
            (5) Cooperative international leadership.--To work with 
        individuals and governments of other nations and the United 
        Nations and its organs and specialized agencies in providing 
        leadership for supporting basic human rights and 
        responsibilities through the provision of sufficient remedies 
        and resources.

SEC. 3. BASIC RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES.

    (a) Updating the 1944 Economic Bill of Rights.--The Congress 
reaffirms the responsibility of the Federal Government to implement 
and, in accordance with current and foreseeable trends, update the 
statement by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the State of the Union 

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