By Rep. Mike Sells
Guest Commentary
Everett Herald

This Sunday's PARADE Magazine asks readers: Does America still need labor unions?

Please take a minute to vote YES in their online poll – and ask your friends, family members and coworkers to vote too.

As a IBEW member, you already know that labor unions build stronger workplaces and protect workers' rights. Unions like ours give workers a real voice for better pay, health care, workplace safety and retirement security.

Now we need your help to make sure that folks across the country know that too.

This online poll may seem unimportant, but it plays a big role in shaping public opinion. 470 Sunday newspapers nationwide carry PARADE Magazine -- reaching nearly 73 million Americans each week.

Tell PARADE Magazine that America still needs unions. Vote YES in their poll – then forward it to your friends, family members and coworkers.

IBEW is fighting each and every day to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which will makes it easier for workers to decide for themselves whether to join a union to bargain for better benefits, wages and working conditions.

Voting in this online poll is just one way to build the nationwide movement for working families. American workers need unions and they need the Employee Free Choice Act.

Let PARADE Magazine's readers know just how much your union means to you.

What is it?
The EWMC is a community service organization dedicated to bettering the community in which we live as well as raising awareness of minority issues.
 
What are you doing?
We would like to start a Chapter in our Local.  We are holding a meeting for anyone interested in learning more about what they can do as an organized group in our community.
 
But I’m not a minority…
The EWMC is not limited to being a minority.  It is for anyone who is interested in community service or wants to know about minority issues.
 
When is it?
Thursday, February 19th
6:00 p.m.
JATC in Mount Vernon

Click here to download the flyer.
 
 
What if I have questions?
Call or e-mail Sanya Hardin!
(360) 202-4911 or
shardin@ibew191.com
 
 
There is lots more information also available at
www.ibew-ewmc.com

HAMPTON, Georgia (CNN) -- Laid-off construction worker Tim Baxter says new federal infrastructure spending could rescue him from his economic free fall -- but he's skeptical.

In the two years since the 54-year-old supervisor was let go from his firm outside Atlanta, Georgia, Baxter has exhausted his unemployment benefits and burned through much of his retirement savings while working two part-time jobs.

"My retirement money is just basically gone," Baxter said recently during a visit to an empty construction site south of the city off Interstate 75. The stress comes when he thinks about whether the economy will begin to turn around by mid-year -- or by year's end.

"I don't know that I can make it that long," he said.

As Baxter well knows, the construction industry has been among the sectors hit hardest by the recession -- drained by a housing market that went belly up. About a million construction industry jobs have disappeared in the two years since the sector peaked at about 7.5 million jobs in 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Married with two grown daughters, Baxter often drives north of Atlanta on Interstate 85 and realizes he's passing a concrete barrier wall for which he helped provide materials. He said it's tough going from earning about $2,000 a week, as he did at his full-time construction job, to scraping out $400 a week between part-time jobs at a national appliance store and delivering newspapers.

All that stands between keeping a roof over his head and losing his home is his wife's office job in the county government, Baxter said.

(CNN) -- While America reels from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, it is time that we take a deeper look at the root causes of our current predicament.

Driven by the insatiable greed of Wall Street profiteers and accelerated by the false promise of free trade, our manufacturing base has been chased out of this country and along with it the livelihood of millions of hard-working Americans.

It's fashionable these days among the politicians, pundits and so-called experts to claim that free trade is actually good for us. They say it enables us to buy cheaper goods made with cheap foreign labor and this, in turn, raises our standard of living.

With all due respect, the free traders need to ask themselves a more fundamental question: how will Americans buy those goods when they don't even have a paycheck that covers their mortgage, much less the college tuition for their children?  Watch Mayor Bernero speak to American Morning's John Roberts »

More than one pundit has told me I need to take a broader view. As the mayor of one of America's countless manufacturing communities, the only view that matters is the one my citizens see every day: Record job losses, home foreclosures and, thanks to the Wall Street wizards, a credit crunch so severe that it is nearly impossible to finance a new car.

This isn't a predicament faced just by Michigan or the Midwest. This is the story of America, told in thousands of desperate households from Connecticut to California.

The pundits claim our manufacturing sector is a relic of the old economy. We're told that we just can't compete anymore. We're told that our future is in the service economy, that jobs in health care and finance and knowledge-based industries will recreate the prosperity our nation once knew.

As recession deepens, companies like Pfizer and Alcoa shed jobs.

By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writer
January 16, 2009: 2:45 PM ET