The Labor Department says employers continued to cut payrolls in August. While the unemployment rate declined one-tenth of one percent to six-point-two percent, a separate survey conducted by the government finds a payrolls decline of 93-thousand jobs last month. That includes the loss of 44-thousand manufacturing jobs. The president of the Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO says Iowa’s doing no better. The July jobless rate was 4.6 percent in Iowa, and Mark Smith says we’ve lost 23-thousand manufacturing jobs since Bush was elected. He says the state has 74-thousand,900 people unemployed in the state and since Bush took over, 44-thousand, 900 hundred of them have been laid off. Iowa Federation of Labor president Mark Smith says the numbers hide the difficulty and anxiety people feel wondering if they’ll be next. Smith says one good way to get tradesmen back to work would be some kind of infrastructure program. Workers could have jobs and help kids learn by air-conditioning schools, and he cites an Iowa State estimate that there’s three and-a-half million dollars wroth of work needing to be done on schools that leak and aren’t “fit for the new millennium.” He says road and bridge repair would be a place to start. Smith says the Bush administration wants to rely on trickle-down economic theories and “most of us are tired of being trickled on.” Smith says it rings hollow to claim there isn’t money for construction jobs when we’re spending a billion dollars a week in Iraq. Iowa’s jobless rate is less than the national figure, but Smith says Iowa traditionally has lower unemployment, and these numbers are high for Iowa.
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