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Taking on Trump, Biden Promotes ‘Infrastructure Decade’ in Wisconsin

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The president made the trip to promote a $1 billion infrastructure project, contrasting his performance with the chaotic “Infrastructure Week” plans of former President Donald J. Trump.Consumer confidence is up. Fears of a recession are abating. The economy is growing. And a corroded bridge in Wisconsin is receiving more funding.It is a wintry mix of positive news for President Biden, who traveled to the shores of a bay near Lake Superior on Thursday to stand at the foot of the Blatnik Bridge, a structure that his administration said would have failed by 2030 without a $1 billion infusion provided by the bipartisan infrastructure law that Mr. Biden championed.The president was there to talk infrastructure and the economy, and to contrast his performance with that of his predecessor and likely challenger in the general election , former President Donald J. Trump.“The economic growth is stronger than we had during the Trump administration,” Mr. Biden, dressed in a casual pullover sweater, said as he addressed Wisconsinites assembled at Earth Rider Brewery in Superior, Wis. “We obviously have more work to do, but we’re making real progress.”As the president spoke, Mr. Trump was taking the stand in a defamation trial in New York, offering a striking split-screen comparison that the Biden campaign has welcomed.Mr. Biden and his advisers believe projects like the Blatnik, taking place in the backyards of Americans living in battleground states like Wisconsin, could be enough to bolster optimism and overcome pervasive skepticism about the state of the economy.In his event, Mr. Biden talked about the $6.1 billion that had been invested in Wisconsin and the $5.7 billion in Minnesota, located just over the bridge, which supports agriculture, shipping and forestry industries in the upper Midwest. The Blatnik, which spans the St. Louis Bay and connects the ports of Superior and Duluth, Minn., had corroded and been clogged with construction and detours.“For decades people talked about replacing this bridge, but it never got done,” Mr. Biden said. “Until today.”Bipartisan law or not, no Republican lawmakers assembled to greet Mr. Biden. (“I’m sorry to say the vast majority voted against it,” Mr. Biden said, a number that includes Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican representing the district where the bridge is located.)“The economic growth is stronger than we had during the Trump administration,” Mr. Biden said.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesThe Democratic governors of both Wisconsin and Minnesota showed up. “This would not have happened without Biden,” Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin told attendees.Several other Democrats, including Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, accompanied the president as he observed the bridge and, later, met with people at a taproom next to the brewery. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota sipped a glass of beer as she mingled next to Mr. Biden.Even without no-show Republicans, who are quickly closing ranks around Mr. Trump, there are other headwinds to overcome.Mr. Biden has faced low approval ratings on the economy. And he has been criticized by other Democrats over whether it was smart of him to adopt Bidenomics as a namesake effort to take credit for an economy that Americans have repeatedly signaled they don’t feel excited about.On Thursday, Mr. Biden did not seem to be feeling any qualms. In the brewery, he stood in front of a pole that had letters spelling “Bidenomics,” and assailed Mr. Trump for “hollowed-out communities, closing down factories, leaving Americans behind.”For his part, Mr. Trump has attacked Mr. Biden on just about everything, but has also falsely claimed that low employment numbers under the Biden administration are not real.Elsewhere in the Midwest, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took rare aim at Mr. Trump during a speech in Chicago.“Our country’s infrastructure has been deteriorating for decades,” Ms. Yellen said on Thursday. “In the Trump administration, the idea of doing anything to fix it was a punchline.”There was truth to her comment. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, he would often veer away from infrastructure-related speeches to attack his enemies. In his first Infrastructure Week-themed event in 2017, he accused James B. Comey, whom he had fired as F.B.I. director, of committing perjury and of leaking to the news media. He later proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure package without specifics on how he’d get the money. The phrase “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke in Washington.In November 2021, Mr. Biden signed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law.“Instead of infrastructure week, America is having an infrastructure decade,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday, referring to the work his administration has done.In a show of how significant Wisconsin will be ahead of the election in November, Mr. Biden traveled there just three days after Vice President Kamala Harris began a nationwide tour for reproductive rights in an event outside Milwaukee. Wisconsin is a battleground state where his campaign is focusing on courting Black voters, young voters and any voters who might help him wrest the state’s 10 electoral votes from Mr. Trump.Though Mr. Trump was in court, the Republican National Committee released a statement criticizing Mr. Biden for making the trip and blaming Bidenomics for economic problems.“With staggering inflation and negative economic growth, Wisconsinites are feeling the brunt of Joe Biden’s failures,” the group’s chairman, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement. “Try as he might, it’s too little, too late to impress workers and families who are living paycheck to paycheck thanks to Bidenomics.”Alan Rappeport More

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    Biden and Harris meet with labor organizers from Amazon and Starbucks.

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    President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh met Thursday at the White House with several union organizers involved in successful campaigns at companies including Amazon and Starbucks.The meeting was intended to discuss how the recent organizing successes can inspire other workers to join or form a union, according to the White House.Alex Speidel, an employee and union leader at Paizo, a publisher of role-playing games in the Seattle area, said the administration officials “were interested in hearing about how we had been successful — what things we had done to motivate people without the union history in their families, first-time union joiners.”A high-profile White House event focused primarily on rank-and-file union members and grassroots organizers is unusual for a president of either party. But a task force on worker organizing led by Ms. Harris, which officially organized Thursday’s meeting, has met with workers outside the White House on several occasions, and rank-and-file union members have attended White House events under Mr. Biden. There have also been White House meetings with labor leaders and senior labor officials.Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, asked Mr. Biden to press Amazon’s leadership to recognize the union and to begin collective bargaining, and Mr. Biden expressed general support in response, according to Mr. Speidel and another attendee, Jaimie Caldwell, a librarian at the Baltimore County Public Library in Maryland. A White House spokeswoman said it was up to the National Labor Relations Board, an independent agency, to certify unions. She also pointed to earlier remarks by Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, noting that President Biden is a longtime advocate “for collective bargaining, for the rights of workers to organize, and their decision to do exactly that” in the case of Amazon.The meeting comes at a time when union organizers have won several high-profile elections, including more than 50 at Starbucks locations and at the Staten Island warehouse where Mr. Smalls led a unionization effort.In addition to union leaders and workers from Amazon, Starbucks, Paizo and the Baltimore County Public Library, the meeting included workers from the outdoor apparel retailer REI and the animation production company Titmouse.Labor leaders often describe Mr. Biden as the most pro-labor president of their lifetimes, pointing to his replacement of government officials they disliked with those more sympathetic to unions, and to the undoing of Trump-era rules that weakened worker protections.During a high-profile union campaign at Amazon last year, Mr. Biden warned that “there should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda,” and he later criticized Kellogg for its plans to permanently replace striking workers during a labor dispute. Both were unusual interjections by a sitting president. More

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    Kamala Harris: Women Leaving Work Force During Pandemic Is a 'National Emergency'

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccine RolloutSee Your Local RiskNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story2.5 Million Women Left the Work Force During the Pandemic. Harris Sees a ‘National Emergency.’“In one year,” Vice President Kamala Harris said, “the pandemic has put decades of the progress we have collectively made for women workers at risk.”On a video call with women’s advocacy groups and lawmakers on Thursday, the vice president painted a dire picture of the situation that millions of American women are facing during the coronavirus pandemic.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFeb. 18, 2021, 5:50 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that the 2.5 million women who have left the work force since the beginning of the pandemic constituted a “national emergency” that could be addressed by the Biden administration’s coronavirus relief plan.That number, according to Labor Department data, compares with 1.8 million men who have left the work force. For many women, the demands of child care, coupled with layoffs and furloughs in an economy hit hard by the pandemic, has forced them out of the labor market.“Our economy cannot fully recover unless women can participate fully,” Ms. Harris said on a video call with several women’s advocacy groups and lawmakers, essentially reiterating the argument she made in a Washington Post op-ed published last week. On the call, the vice president painted a dire picture of the situation that millions of American women are facing during the pandemic. “In one year,” she said, “the pandemic has put decades of the progress we have collectively made for women workers at risk.”“Women are not opting out of the work force,” Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, said after attending the panel. “They are being pushed by inadequate policies.”As part of its $1.9 trillion relief plan, the Biden administration has outlined several elements that officials say will ease the burden on unemployed and working women, including $3,000 in tax credits issued to families for each child, a $40 billion investment in child care assistance and an extension of unemployment benefits.Ms. Harris said on Thursday that the package would “lift up nearly half of the children who are living in poverty in our country,” a claim backed by a Columbia University analysis of the plan.A recent Quinnipiac poll showed broad support for the Biden administration’s proposal, but so far, Republicans have not embraced it. Democrats aim to pass the plan using a fast-track budgetary process known as reconciliation, which would allow them to push it through the Senate with a simple majority. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, unveiled his own child tax credit proposal this month, but it was promptly panned by colleagues in his party.“I think that there is absolute reason to believe that Republicans should support this,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who participated in the call. But she added that her party had ensured that the proposal could go forward without the Republicans.Child care remains an issue for working mothers, and it was a major theme of the round table on Thursday. Nearly 400,000 child care jobs have been lost since the outset of the pandemic, Ms. Harris said. The closings of small businesses and the loss of millions of jobs have created the “perfect storm” for women, particularly for Black business owners, she added. “The longer we wait to act,” she said, “the harder it will be to bring these millions of women back into the work force.”The Coronavirus Outbreak More