Download
Audio and Video: http://pan.baidu.com/s/1gdzK5ur Weekly
Address: The President’s Year of Action
May 3, 2014
Hi, everybody. My number one priority as President is doing
whatever I can to create more jobs and opportunity for hardworking
families. And yesterday, we learned that
businesses added 273,000 jobs last month.
All told, our businesses have now created 9.2 million new jobs over 50
consecutive months of job growth.
But we need to keep going – to
create more good jobs, and give middle-class families a sense of security. And I want to work with Congress to do it.
But so far this year, Republicans
in Congress have blocked or voted down every serious idea to create jobs and
strengthen the middle class. They’ve
said “no” to raising the minimum wage, “no” to equal pay for equal work, and
“no” to restoring the unemployment insurance they let expire for more than two
million Americans looking for a new job.
That’s not what we need right
now. Not when there are still too many
folks out of work and too many families working harder than ever just to get
by.
That’s why, in my State of the
Union Address, I said that in this Year
of Action, whenever I can act on my own to create jobs and expand
opportunity for more Americans, I will.
And since January, I’ve taken more than 20 executive actions to do just
that.
I acted to raise more workers’
wages by requiring that workers on new federal contracts earn a fair wage of at
least $10.10 an hour – and as long as Republicans in Congress refuse to act,
I’ll keep working with cities, states, and businesses to give more Americans a
raise. I acted to encourage more pay transparency
and strengthen enforcement of equal pay laws, so that more women have the tools
they need to earn fair pay. And I’m
modernizing regulations to make sure that more Americans who work overtime get
the pay that they’ve earned. I’ve
launched new hubs to help attract more high-tech manufacturing jobs to America
– and ordered a reform of job training programs to make sure more Americans can
earn the skills that employers need right now.
I’ve brought together business leaders to help us connect more classrooms
to high-speed internet, and give more of the long-term unemployed a better shot
at finding a job.
Each of these steps will make a
difference. You can check out the full
list at whitehouse.gov.
But we could do a lot more if
Republicans in Congress were less interested in stacking the deck in favor of
those at the top, and more interested in growing the economy for
everybody. They’ve now voted more than
50 times to take apart the Affordable
Care Act – imagine if they voted 50 times on serious jobs bills.
That’s why I’m going to take
action on my own wherever I can. To grow
our economy from the middle-out, not the top down. To give every American who works hard a
chance to get ahead.
That’s what this Year of Action is all about, and that’s
what I’m going to keep fighting for.
Thanks, and have a great weekend. |
