The union movement and our allies are taking our fight for good jobs now to the biggest Wall Street banks whose reckless greed has gone a long way to wreck the U.S. economy and kill American jobs.

From March 15-26, working people will hold rallies and demonstrations at branches of the Big Six Wall Street banks—Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup, Wachovia-Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—across the country. They will tell the banks “We Are Not Your ATMs” and “Make Wall Street Pay for Creating New Jobs.”

You also can tell Wall Street executives to pay to create good jobs by sending a letter urging them to do the right thing. Just click here.

Find out about events in your area here. If you take part in an event, be sure to send us your photo or video here.

The AFL-CIO Good Jobs Now site has all the tools you’ll need to let Wall Street know we mean business. There’s a Wall Street fact sheet, along with an explanation of our stand on making Wall Street pay to create good jobs, arguments for extending unemployment insurance benefits, creating good, green jobs with benefits and other issues.

While working families lost jobs, homes and hope, Wall Street took $700 billion in taxpayer bailouts and went right back to business as usual—choking off credit, handing out about $145 billion in 2009 pay and bonuses to the executives who tanked our economy and hiring an army of lobbyists to fight financial reform.

The nation is more than 10 million jobs in the hole. We need good jobs now—and it’s time Wall Street helps pay to create them. The AFL-CIO supports a four-part package of measures to ensure the government has the funds to pay back what we must spend to create jobs. These measures have the additional benefits of moving the financial sector back to its proper role as the servant, not the master, of the real economy—a creator of jobs rather than a destroyer of jobs:

• First, we strongly support President Obama’s proposal to impose fees on Wall Street banks to pay back the cost of the bank bailout.
• Second, we support the imposition of a special levy on Wall Street bonuses, as proposed in the United Kingdom.
• Third, we support taxing the income of hedge fund and private equity managers, the wealthiest people in the country, at ordinary income rates, by closing the carried interest loophole.
• Fourth, and most important, the AFL-CIO joins with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) in supporting a financial speculation tax, and we call upon the Obama administration to support the proposals for an internationally coordinated adoption of such a tax by the world’s major financial market countries.