October 1, 1940 (this is how you put people to work)

[Omaha Steve]

http://nhlabornews.com/2015/10/october-1-1940/

The Pennsylvania Turnpike – the nation’s first long-distance controlled-access highway – opens nearly two years after construction began along the original path of an abandoned South Pennsylvania Railroad project of the 1880s. The project was financed by a loan from the New Deal’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation and grants from the Works Progress Administration, employing more than 15,000 workers from 18 states.



About Today In Labor History
The NHLN has joined with multiple other websites to help highlight some of the struggles that workers have faced throughout our history. We want everyone to know what the workers of the past had to endure for the rights we take for granted now. If you do not learn from the past, you are doomed to repeat it.

[madokie]

1. We have the work

just not the politicians who want to do it by giving unemployed people a job. The Works there just begging to be done. All over this country of broken down hiways, waterways, bridges, overpasses, water lines, waste water lines and the list could go on for quiet some time.

Elect Bernie Sanders and lets get this ball rolling before its too late.

[Thinkingabout]

2. There was a better congress in 1940 and we let this congress fall deeper into the hands of

Republicans in 2012 by not voting and targeting some of Democrats in reelection efforts. What we are getting from congress is exactly what can be expected in the future by playing the same game again.

[riversedge]

3. I have always said we need an FDR type works program--esp. I talked about it to

my Rep after the 2008-9 recession. In my book we still need one--good jobs and living wages. Lots of low paying jobs around here only. I still remember my dad talking about (he lived thru it) about that Roosevelt guy --as he called FDR--getting the REC -rural electric coop--going in our neck of the woods in the early 1940's. Small dairy farms milked by hand-no electricity in rural areas in WI -and elsewhere across the land. One line ran from the road to the barn-He now had a pump to help milk cows. Happy man he was --he said. Many years before a line was run to the house for electricity.