By Thomas A. Kochan

This Labor Day weekend every American is asking the same question as the enormity of human and economic tragedy produced by Katrina hits home:  What can we do to help?   The President says, send money.  Yes, we should all do that but clearly more is needed. Rebuilding the lives, communities, and economy of the hundreds of thousands of displaced families and coping with the economic ripple effects of this crisis will call for leadership and a new spirit of innovation and cooperation from us all.

FDR instinctively understood the need for this type of cooperation and unity in his time of great crisis. Within two weeks of Pearl Harbor he brought the nation’s business and labor leaders together with key government officials and insisted they set aside any partisan differences and work together to help the country through its crisis. In response they not only reallocated their resources to produce the planes, ships, and materials (including inventing radar and the atomic bomb) needed to support and win the war but also worked together to maintain labor peace, train a new generation of workers (remember Rosie the Riveter?), and hold inflation in check. And by working together these parties invented many of the workplace practices we take for granted today—fair wages linked to productivity and profits, grievance procedures for resolving disputes without strikes, modern fringe benefits such as vacation pay, pensions, and health insurance. The crowning innovation was the GI Bill that helped returning soldiers get the education they needed to achieve a middle class standard of living for their families.

The same type of cooperation across business, labor, education, and community service providers will be needed to address the full dimension of today’s crisis. Hundreds of thousands of homeless parents and children are going to need health care, education, jobs, and will have to live together in close and unfamiliar quarters. Many of those displaced not only will have lost their jobs; some never had one because they lack basic job skills needed to be productive and prosper in anything other than the underground or illegal economy. If we don’t act in unity to address these issues, there is a good chance that the anger, frustration, and despair we see on TV will explode and spread.

Here is an alternative. When the Congress reconvenes it should not just pass an emergency authorization for FEMA and related agencies. It should create an Economic and Social Reconstruction Fund with incentives for private sector matching investments to provide essential food, housing, health care, educational, and social services the displaced families will need to survive and the resources needed to finance the recovery and rebuilding process.

A national unity business, labor, government leadership council should be created to oversee these investments and to provide training and jobs in the rebuilding process for all displaced adults willing and able to work.

This effort must extend beyond the immediate Gulf Coast region. The ripple effect of higher fuel prices could easily set off an inflationary spiral and job losses we haven’t seen since the energy crisis of the 1970s.

Like after 9/11, Congress and the President will see requests for emergency funds from the oil industry to rebuild damaged platforms and bring production facilities back on line. We should learn from the failures of the airline industry bailouts given after 9/11. By throwing money at the companies without insisting labor and business face their crisis together we got bankruptcies, enormous job, wage, and benefit cuts and we still have an industry in which the majority of companies lack sustainable business models.

Given skyrocketing fuel prices, more bankruptcies and pleas for government help are clearly coming from airlines and other energy sensitive industries. This time if relief is to be provided, it should be made contingent on commitments from business, labor, and related government agencies to work together to produce an adjustment strategy and business plan that works for all stakeholders--business, workers, and consumers. For autos, another industry that will be crying wolf, this should include an immediate mobilization of resources to shift production from gas guzzling SUVs and trucks to fuel efficient and hybrid vehicles consumers will need in an economy that will face oil shortages for the foreseeable future.

So, who will be the modern FDR to step forward with the bold and pragmatic ideas needed to unite the country and put our best energies to work so we indeed come out of this crisis stronger, more unified, and better positioned to deal with crises like this in the future?

Thomas A. Kochan is the George M. Bunker Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of Restoring the American Dream: A Working Families Agenda for America.