[Congressional Bills 108th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H.R. 1040 Introduced in House (IH)]
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
message of January 11, 1944. The Congress therefore proclaims the
following rights as continuing goals of United States public policy:
(1) Decent jobs.--(A) The right of every adult American to
earn decent real wages, to a free choice among opportunities
for useful and productive paid employment, or for self-
employment. The right of every child not to have to work during
school hours.
(B) With more full employment at living wages, the economy
will be more productive, attain higher levels of responsible
and sustainable growth and provide more Federal revenues even
without desirable changes in existing tax laws.
(2) Income security for individuals unable to work for
pay.--(A) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the right
of every adult American truly unable to work for pay to an
adequate standard of living that rises with increases in the
wealth and productivity of the society.
(B) With more full employment at living wages, more
individuals will be able to earn a decent living without the
help of welfare benefits or other transfer payments.
(3) Family farming.--(A) The right of every farm family to
raise and sell its products at a return which will give it a
decent living through the production of useful food, with
staged incentives for conversion from unhealthy to healthier
food or other products, with special attention to production
processes that conserve soil, water, and energy and reduce
pollution.
(B) With more full employment at living wages, the market
for farm output will be enlarged, with less need for controls
over output, or Federal, State, or local support prices or
subsidies.
(4) Freedom from monopolies.--(A) The right of every
business enterprise, large and small, to operate in freedom
from domination by domestic and foreign monopolies and cartels,
and from threats of undesirable mergers or leveraged buy-outs,
and the right of consumers to obtain goods and services at
prices that are not determined by monopolies, cartels, and
price leadership.
(B) With more full employment at living wages, more
business enterprises will be able to earn profits without
monopolistic controls or government welfare and consumers will
be able to enjoy lower prices.
(5) Decent housing.--(A) The right of every American to
decent, safe, and sanitary housing, public utilities, and
community facilities, with adequate maintenance and
weatherization, including large-scale rehabilitation of
millions of existing buildings, thereby helping to reduce
overcrowding and energy loss and the need to build new roads,
power plants, storm sewers, sewage, and refuse disposal.
(B) With more full employment at living wages more people
will be able afford adequate housing with less government
subsidy.
(6) Adequate health services.--(A) The right of every
American to such widely available health services as may be
necessary to promote wellness, extend both life expectancy and
activity expectancy, and reduce mortality and disability
through such non-contagious afflictions as cancer, heart
disease, stroke, infant mortality, high blood pressure and
obesity, and reduce the incidence of contagious diseases.
(B) With more full employment at living wages, more tax
revenues will be available to help finance expanded health
services for a larger and older population.
(7) Social security.--(A) The right to adequate protection
from the economic fears of old age, disability, sickness,
accident, and unemployment.
(B) With more full employment at living wages and higher
levels of responsible growth, more tax revenues will be
available to help finance Social Security, medicare, medicaid,
unemployment compensation, and welfare payments.
(8) Education and work training.--(A) Every individual has
a right to opportunities for continuous learning through free
public education, from pre-kindergarten and kindergarten
through postsecondary levels.
(B) With more full employment at living wages, more local,
State and Federal revenues will be available to help support
education and continuous learning.
(b) Extending the 1944 Economic Bill of Rights.--The Congress
proclaims the following additional rights as continuing goals of United
States public policy:
(1) Personal security.--The right of every American to
personal security against any form of violence, whether in the
home, in the workplace, on the streets and highways, in the
community or the nation.
(2) Employee organizing and collective bargaining.--
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the right of all
employees to organize and bargain collectively, to withhold
from any form of work or purchasing when necessary to protect
such rights, and to receive full diplomatic, economic, and
other support from the Federal Government in helping make this
right effective in other countries and eliminating policies or
activities that undermine such rights.
(3) Safe environments.--The right of every American to
unpolluted breathable air, to potable water available through a
reliable and safe water supply, to safety from hazardous
materials and energy blackouts, and to such international
protections as may be needed to facilitate living and working
in a safe and sustainable physical environment.
(4) Information.--The right of every American to currently
available and fully explained information on recent and
foreseeable trends with respect to sources of pollution and on
products and processes that threaten the health or life of
individuals and on employment, unemployment, underemployment,
economic insecurity, poverty, and the distribution of wealth
and income, with detailed attention to various groups in the
population and broader panoramic attention to such matters in
each region of the world.
(5) Voting.--The right of every American to vote and to
seek nomination or election without having that right debased
by the domination of electoral campaigns by large-scale private
financing of campaign operations or by the scheduling of
elections during weekdays or by unequal voting machines and
processes, or in other manners that may interfere with regular
working hours.
(c) Personal Responsibility.--The Congress hereby recognizes that
every person benefiting from the rights set forth in subsections (a)
and (b) has a personal responsibility to promote her or his health and
wellbeing, rather than relying exclusively on health services by
others, to provide for appropriate care to the best of their abilities
of children and elderly parents, to protect the environment, to work
productively, to vote, to involve herself or himself in public concerns
and in ongoing education and training, to speak out against corruption
or injustice, and to cooperate with others in promoting the nonviolent
handling of inevitable conflicts in the household, the workplace, the
community and elsewhere.
(d) Corporate Responsibility.--
(1) Reports to the securities and exchange commission.--To
help implement the recognition of the most responsible
corporations and encourage more responsible behavior by other
corporations, each corporation registered with the Securities
and Exchange Commission shall include in the annual reports
filed with the Commission a full and fair disclosure of
information regarding the impact of their activities in the
United States and other countries on environmental quality, on
child labor, and on the rights of other stakeholders, including
employees, consumers, and communities.
(2) Reports by state-chartered corporations.--To help
implement the recognition of the most responsible corporations
and encourage movement in this direction by other corporations,
a State shall not be entitled to receive any Federal grants or
enter into any Federal contracts unless the State has initiated
a time-phased program to require that all State-chartered
corporations submit annual reports that include full and fair
disclosure of information regarding the impact of their
activities in this or other countries on environmental quality,
on child labor, and on the rights of other stakeholders,
including employees, consumers, and communities.
(3) Recognition of most responsible corporations.--Because
some profit-seeking corporations have managed their enterprises
with recognition not only of the rights of stockholders and
chief executives, but also with responsible action toward
environmental quality and the rights of other stakeholders,
including employees, consumers, and communities, the Secretary
of Labor, in cooperation with the Director of the Environmental
Protection Agency, shall identify those corporations that have
gone the furthest in exercising such responsibilities and recommend to
the President a special annual award to those chief executives and
boards of directors that have made the greatest progress in this
direction.
(4) Computer registration of corporate crimes.--
(A) In general.--The Attorney General, with the
assistance of business leaders and organizations, shall
establish an ongoing computerized registration program
of all corporations that are found guilty of violating
a Federal or State law. The register shall set forth--
(i) the nature of each violation;
(ii) the names of the members of the board
and principal officers of the corporation at
the time of the violation;
(iii) the penalties imposed; and
(iv) the extent to which penalties were
reduced or avoided by consent decrees, plea
bargains, and no contest pleas or tax
deductions.
(B) Registration noncompliance.--In the absence of
clear and convincing evidence of rehabilitation, the
President may deny Federal contracts, loans, or loan
guarantees to corporations that fail to comply with
this section.
(e) Responsibility of Federal Government.--
(1) Positive responsibilities.--Each Federal agency and
commission, including the Board of Governors of the Federal
Reserve System, has the responsibility to plan and carry out
its policies, programs, projects, and budgets in a manner
designed to help establish and maintain conditions under which
all Americans may freely exercise the responsibilities and
rights recognized in this Act.
(2) Prohibition.--Each such Federal agency or commission
shall not directly or indirectly promote economic recession,
stagnation, or unemployment as a means of reducing wages,
salaries, or inflation.
SEC. 4. OVERALL PLANNING FOR FULL EMPLOYMENT.
(a) Goals.--As a part of the annual submission of the budget of the
United States Government for the following fiscal year pursuant to
section 1105 of title 31, United States Code, the President shall
establish a framework for such budget that meets the following goals:
(1) Quality of life and environment.--The goal of improving
the quality of life and environmental conditions in the United
States by the first decade of the 21st century, including
establishing and maintaining conditions under which the rights
and responsibilities recognized in section 3 may be fully
exercised.
(2) Goals for responsible and sustainable growth.--The goal
of responsible and sustainable annual growth of at least 3
percent, after correction for price changes, in gross domestic
output.
(3) Reducing officially measured unemployment.--The goal of
reducing officially measured unemployment to the interim goal
of at least 3 percent for individuals who have attained the age
of 20 and at least 4 percent for individuals who have attained
the age of 16 but have not attained the age of 20, as set forth
in the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978.
(4) Supporting international human rights declarations.--
The goal of implementing the commitments set forth in the
Employment Act of 1946, the Full Employment and Balanced Growth
Act of 1978, and in treaties ratified by the United States,
including the Charter of the United Nations, the Charter of the
Organization of American States, the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the
International Convention Against Torture and other Cruel,
Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, including the
Federal and State reporting requirements, and in treaties
signed but not yet ratified by the United States, including the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination of Women, and the International Convention on
the Rights of the Child, and in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which is a part of customary international law.
(b) A Full Employment Minimum.--The framework for the annual budget
established under subsection (a) shall also include, as a basic minimum
of activities needed to achieve conditions under which Americans may
better fulfill basic human rights and responsibilities, specific
legislative proposals, budgets, and executive policies and initiatives
such as the following:
(1) Conversion from military to civilian economy.--The
establishment of the following:
(A) The establishment of a conversion planning
fund, to be administered under the guidance of the
Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Labor, and the
Secretary of Commerce, to include not less than 1
percent of the amount appropriated for military
purposes during each subsequent year for the purpose of
promoting and activating short- and long-term plans for
coping with declines in military activities by
developing specific policies, programs and projects
(including feasibility studies, education, training and
inducements for whatever increased labor mobility may
be necessary) for the expansion of economic activates
in non-military sectors.
(B) The recognition of the right of all businesses
with terminated military contracts to fair
reimbursement for the work already completed by such
businesses, including quick advance payments on initial
claims, adequate termination payments for released
employees, and conversion assistance for communities
previously dependent on such contracts.
(2) Truth in budgets.--The establishment of policies and
initiatives that--
(A) make distinctions between operating and
investment outlays as such outlays regularly appear in
the budgets of business organizations and State and
local governments;
(B) present outlays of the military in terms not
only of Department of Defense outlays but also of all
other forms of military related spending;
(C) provide for the development of a tax
expenditure budget, as defined in the Congressional
Budget Act of 1974, that is presented not only in a
separately published special analysis but also
incorporated into the general revenue provisions of the
budget and accompanied by estimates of the benefits
sought and thus far obtained by such planned losses of
tax revenue; and
(D) express any debt and deficit data in constant
as well as current United States dollars.
(3) Improved indicators of progress and regress.--(A) The
establishment of procedures for the collecting, processing, and
making publicly available improved indicators of recent,
current and foreseeable trends with respect to--
(i) health, life expectancy, activity expectancy,
morbidity and disability in the United States;
(ii) employment, unemployment, underemployment, and
economic insecurity data;
(iii) indices of job security, family security, and
the ratio of job applicants to job openings in the
United States;
(iv) poverty in the sense of both absolute
deprivation and relative deprivation;
(v) the distribution of wealth and income in the
United States;
(vi) the sources of pollution, products and
processes that threaten the health or life of people in
the United States; and
(vii) the kinds, quantity, and quality of unpaid
services in homes, households, and neighborhoods,
including volunteer activities.
(B) In establishing the procedures under subparagraph (A),
emphasis shall be placed on distinguishing among the various
groups in the population of the United States and on trends
with respect to such matters in other countries.
(4) Anti-inflation policies.--The establishment of policies
and initiatives for preventing or controlling inflationary
tendencies through a full battery of standby policies,
including public controls over price fixing through
monopolistic practices or restraint of trade, the promotion of
competition and productivity, and wage-price policies arrived
at through tripartite business-labor-government cooperation.
(5) Lower real interest rates.--The establishment of
policies and initiatives to enlarge employment opportunities
through reductions in real interest rates.
(6) Public works and services.--The establishment of
policies and initiatives for including provisions in Federal
grant programs and other assistance programs to encourage the
planning and fulfillment of public works and public services
planning by town, city, county and State governments projects--
(A) to improve the quality of life for all people
in the area;
(B) to renovate, and to the extent desirable,
enlarge the decaying infrastructure of public
facilities and services required for productive,
efficient, and profitable enterprise;
(C) to utilize the wasted labor power, and nurture
the creative energies of, those suffering from
joblessness and poverty; and
(D) to have contracts awarded competitively to
smaller as well as larger business enterprises or such
other private sector units as non-profit enterprises,
labor unions, cooperatives, neighborhood corporations
or other voluntary associations.
(7) International economic policy.--The establishment of
policies and initiatives to make any future financial support
for the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development to be conditioned on
development and implementation of certain policies and
procedures by such institutions, including the protection of
the rights of women and children, concern for the environment,
employees' right to organize and to work in safe and healthy
conditions as will help raise the living standards of those
people with the lowest levels of income and wealth, thereby
promoting such higher levels of wages and salaries in such
countries as will provide larger markets for their own
industries and for imports of goods and services from the
United States.
(8) International conferences on unemployment and
underemployment.--The establishment of policies and
initiatives--
(A) to begin working toward the prompt initiation
of a series of international and regional conferences
through the United Nations and International Labor
Organization on alternative methods of reducing
involuntary unemployment, underemployment, and poverty;
and
(B) to organize, through the Department of Labor,
planning seminars and other sessions in preparation for
a worldwide conference and convention of independent
labor unions.
(9) Reductions in hours.--The establishment of policies and
initiatives to provide for phased-in actions for reductions in
the length of the work year through longer paid vacations, the
prohibition on compulsory return to work of new mothers before
six months maternity leave, the elimination of compulsory
overtime, curbing excessive overtime through an increase in the
premium to triple time on all hours in excess of 40 hours in
any week, exempting administrative, executive, and professional
employees from the overtime premium only if their salary levels
are three times the annual value of the minimum wage, reducing
the average work week in manufacturing and mining to no more than 35
hours without any corresponding loss in weekly wages, and voluntary
work-sharing arrangements.
(10) Part-time employment with social benefits.--The
establishment of policies and initiatives to increase the
opportunities for freely-chosen part-time employment, with
social security and health benefits, to meet the needs of older
people, students, individuals with disabilities, and
individuals with housekeeping, child care, and family care
responsibilities.
(11) Insurance protection for pension fund investments.--
The establishment of policies and initiatives to encourage more
private and public investment in those areas of localized
depression in which people suffer from massive joblessness,
overcrowded schools, overcrowded housing, inadequate library
and transportation facilities, violence and social breakdown
by--
(A) promoting comprehensive plans for raising the
quality of life through expanded small business
activity, middle income housing (including
rehabilitation) and improvements in private and public
infrastructure;
(B) encouraging private, Federal, State and local
pension funds to invest a substantial portion of their
resources in projects approved in accordance with such
plans; and
(C) protecting the beneficiaries of such funds by
whatever insurance guarantees may be needed to
eliminate the risks involved by entering areas not
normally regarded as profitable by banks and other
investors.
(12) Other matters.--The establishment of policies and
initiatives to present and continuously adjust proposals,
budgets and executive policies and initiatives on taxation,
Social Security, health care, child care, public education,
training and retraining, the arts and humanities, basic and
applied science, housing, public transportation, public
utilities, military conversion, environmental protection, anti-
racism, agriculture, enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, public
financing of election campaigns, crime prevention, punishment
and rehabilitation, and such other matters as may be necessary
to fulfill the objectives of this Act.
SEC. 5. JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE.
(a) Monitoring of Actions Under This Act.--In addition to its
responsibilities under the Employment Act of 1946, the Joint Economic
Committee shall monitor all actions taken or proposed to be taken to
carry out the purposes under this Act.
(b) Report.--The Joint Economic Committee shall prepare and submit
to the Congress, and publish in the Federal Register, an annual report
containing a summary of the findings of the Committee with respect to
the actions monitored under subsection (a) for the preceding year, with
special attention to the extent to which the President and Federal
agencies have faithfully executed or may have failed to faithfully
execute the provisions of this Act and fulfill their obligations under
international covenants and conventions requiring periodic reporting to
United Nations committees.
(c) Concurrent Resolution on Economic Policy.--Not later than July
1 of each year the Joint Economic Committee shall submit to the Senate
and the House of Representatives a Concurrent Resolution on Economic
Policy setting forth both in aggregate terms and in detail its proposed
goals for employment by type of employment, with special attention to
hours, wages, and social benefits, and for reducing unemployment,
underemployment, and poverty in urban, suburban and rural areas.
Notwithstanding any other provisions of law, these goals shall serve as
the framework for any concurrent resolutions on the Federal budget.
SEC. 6. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.
There are hereby authorized to be appropriated such sums as may be
necessary for operating and investment expenses to implement the
policies, programs and projects set forth in accordance with this Act.
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