Obama vows to ‘keep fighting’ for job growth

President Obama on Saturday touted his number one priority as commander-in-chief: creating more jobs.

In his weekly address, Obama highlighted progress he’s made on strengthening the economy, citing figures released Friday that showed the U.S. added 273,000 jobs last month, and 9.2 million new jobs over 50 consecutive months. 

{mosads}”My number one priority as President is doing whatever I can to create more jobs and opportunity for hardworking families,” he said. 

Since January, the president said he’s taken more than 20 executive actions to help the economy in his self-declared “Year of Action.” 

Those actions included raising federal worker wages to at least $10.10 an hour, encouraging more pay transparency for women and strengthening enforcement of equal pay laws, and modernizing regulations to make sure that more Americans get overtime pay. 

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress were obstructing progress by blocking or voting down “every serious idea to create jobs and strengthen the middle class,” he said. 

“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,” he said. 

“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,” he added. 

Obama said much more progress could be made if Republicans 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,” he said. 

The president vowed to continue taking further action on his own wherever possible, to grow the economy “from the middle-out, not the top down.” 

“That’s what this Year of Action is all about, and that’s what I’m going to keep fighting for,” he said.