Organized labor gives Obama high grades so far

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29725148/

By Tom Curry
National affairs writer
msnbc.com
updated 9:56 a.m. CT, Fri., March. 20, 2009

Tom Curry National affairs writer

So far, so good, union leaders say in assessing President Barack Obama’s performance in his first two months in office.

But the furor over bonus payments made to some AIG employees has caused a note of wariness to creep into labor’s most recent assessments of Obama.

“President Obama said very clearly the buck stops with him. He made it clear he objects to these bonuses and the administration will do everything it can to stop them,” said Rich Clayton, the research director for Change to Win, an alliance of seven unions including the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union.

But, Clayton added, Obama and his aides “need to review right now whether the strategy put in place (to help AIG) last year is likely to work.”

The Obama team could be “much harder in bargaining with the counterparties” to AIG’s investment insurance contracts, he said. Those counterparties have included banks and financial firms such as Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.

Change AIG strategy
“We strongly support the Obama administration, but we think they’ve got to make the case why they need to stick with the strategy” of subsidizing AIG, Clayton said. He suggested it might be preferable to let the financial products division of AIG enter bankruptcy while the rest of the business units are sold.

FULL 2 page story at link.