Thomas Daschle: “I come for a couple of minutes this afternoon to reflect on both the recent holiday yesterday as well as my experiences…”

“I come for a couple of minutes this afternoon to reflect on both the recent holiday yesterday as well as my experiences in South Dakota over the last 4 weeks. We celebrated Labor Day yesterday with parades and celebrations around the country. We have been doing so now for 120 years. Peter McGuire was a carpenter and a labor organizer who brought 20,000 workers to march in New York for better working conditions some 120 years ago. Still today it is a day to honor our working people and their contribution and to recommit ourselves to advancing their rights and protections. I spent the August recess driving through South Dakota, as I do every year, without schedule or staff, talking to South Dakotans about the concerns they have. We have 66 counties in our State. I get into all 66 every year. I went to just under 30 counties during the month of August. Driving as I did, talking to working men and women, families, business people, farmers, and ranchers, I heard a great deal about jobs, about health care, about the state of agriculture. Joblessness in our country has now reached 9.1 million people; 3.2 million private sector jobs have been lost since January of 2001. That is a 50-percent increase. Another 5 million, we are told, are underemployed, forced to take part-time work because they cannot find good jobs.”