WASHINGTON - VICE-PRESIDENT-ELECT Joe Biden will oversee an Obama administration effort to find ways of building up the ranks of the middle class, that ambiguously defined segment of society most Americans identify themselves with.

The task force will include four Cabinet members as well as other presidential advisers, the Obama transition team announced on Sunday.

The goal is to recommend proposals to ensure the middle class is 'no longer being left behind,' Mr Biden said. The proposals could include executive orders and legislative plans.

'Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families,' Mr Biden said in a statement released on Sunday. 'Is the number of these families growing? Are they prospering?

President-elect Obama and I know the economic health of working families has eroded, and we intend to turn that around.' Overseeing a task force has become tradition for vice-presidents.

Mr Dick Cheney led a task force on energy. Mr Al Gore had the task of reinventing government. Mr George H.W. Bush, while serving as Ronald Reagan's vice-president, oversaw a task force charged with reducing government regulation.

While all of those efforts resulted in some accomplishments, it's also clear that the issues they confronted were so large and systemic that many could and did question the progress they made.

Mr Biden said the measure of economic success in an Obama administration would be whether the middle class was growing.

The transition team promised the task force's work would be transparent, with annual reports on its findings and recommendations. Also, any submissions from outside groups are to be posted on the Internet. By comparison, Mr Cheney, a former oil man, fought to keep the White House energy task force's deliberations secret.

Task force members will include the secretaries of labor, health and human services, education, and commerce, as well as the directors of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the Domestic Policy Council and the head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

In an interview broadcast on Sunday on ABC television's 'This Week', Mr Biden took care to define his role as vice president as going beyond a particular task.

He said that when he discussed the job with Mr Barack Obama during the campaign, he told Mr Obama he didn't 'want to be the guy that goes out and has a specific assignment.' Rather, he wanted to have a voice in every matter of importance.

'I said I want a commitment from you that in every important decision you'll make, every critical decision, economic and political as well as foreign policy, I'll get to be in the room,' Biden said.

He said that Mr Obama agreed and has adhered to that commitment.

'Every single solitary appoapment he has made thus far, I have been in the room,' said Mr Biden, who was elected seven times to the Senate. 'The recommendations I have made in most cases, coincidentally, have been the recommendations that he's picked, not because I made them, but because we think a lot alike.'

Mr Biden also covered topics from the auto bailout to his continued desire to close the Guantanamo prison holding terrorist suspects: -The loan agreement for automakers will require sacrifices from all segments of the industry.

While saying organised labour did not bring the carmakers to the brink of collapse, unions in particular are 'going to have to make some additional sacrifices, and they know it and they understand it'. -- AP