It is 9 pm on a very cold Philadelphia night as I sit down to write this. I've just returned from a closed casket viewing of my 19-year-old union brother Mark Keely who was blown up in a gas main explosion three nights ago. Three other union members of his work crew were burned from head to toe.
Brother Mark was 19 and had been on the job just five months.
Death and horrible injury is a daily possibility for members of the Utility Workers Union of America. Our members are the first of the first responders cutting off the electricity and gas so firefighters and police officers can so their jobs.
No one knows how many lives Brother Keely and his crew saved with their ultimate sacrifice.
Hundreds and hundreds of union members were at St. Cecilia's Catholic Church tonight -- gas workers and utility workers and cops and fire fighters and machinists and on and on.
I cried as I hugged Mark's Dad and Mother and greeted member after member with Local Union President Keith Holmes.
Mark's death is a stark reminder that America's workers go to the job every day risking their health and their lives.
17 of us die every week.
My mother died of a massive heart attack in her classroom six months before her retirement.
Yet those who blather and blabber about how American workers live too well and how we have to compete with the poorest and most exploited workers in the world and how we have to raise the Social Security retirement age never have to get off their asses at their desk with the best view of whatever city they are in.
Mark Keely worked hard every day of his working life. He deserved to live a full, rich life like all other workers. But until we realize that working families deserve the best of life--not material riches but dignity and respect and safety, too many of us will die before our time.
Most people think we have lost many of our jobs to Asia because of cheap labor! This is wrong! We have lost these jobs because of cheap dirty coal energy! I have friends working in Asia because they could not find jobs here! We were comparing energy cost; my energy cost is between 4.5-7.5 times theirs!
My industrial electric rates are greater than $0.13/kwh. With dirty coal energy you can make ~ 2500kwh per ton. Long term contracts cost ~ $35.00/ton. This breaks down to ~ $0.015/kwh.
China consumed over 45% of all coal burnt on the planet in 2009! We all know that percentage went up last year! Cheap energy means jobs, means wealth!
I'm not suggesting we go to dirty coal and make our cities as smoggy as L.A. 30 years ago! We need to restrict fossil fuel usage just not here but its usage on the products sold here!
We must remove the initial cost advantage of fossil fuels. We have always past down to our children the hidden cost of fossil fuels.
President Obama please asks for an environmental tax or tariff on the manufacturing and transportation of all products sold.
Use the tax code to change the rules of trade!
Do you have a link to those stats?
Because that's what you just claimed.
The actual number of jobs created while Reagan was in office was
15,935,000, over the course of eight years.
With a population of 248,709,873 as of the 1990 census, it seems unlikely there were only 16,000,000 people employed when Reagan took office, esp. as job growth under Carter was
10,488,000 (and that in just four years, so the rate of growth was better under Carter).
Here is the link:
http://www.davemanuel.com/2010/12/01/non-farm-payroll-job-growth-vs-population-growth-by-president-since-1948/
An average of at least sixteen of them per day. (See below.)
Sixteen Per Day
http://16deathsperday.com/
It was the American worker, both enslaved and free, that built this country to be a great nation that leads the world by example, not rhetoric. Today, our crumbling infrastructure betrays the fact that our American workers are in a steep decline and business sees no obligation to support them because management can replace the American worker with workers overseas and make themselves richer and even more profitable.
I am sad for your loss. Its tragic to lose a young man at the start of his working career. It hurts us all to varying degrees to see our workers who are our kin, our friends and our neighbors so senselessly lost in the line of duty. And, it adds insult to injury when no one in the MSM cares enough to bring the loss to our collective attention in order to prevent future losses of the same nature from occurring to others.
The message is clear: We have forgotten what made this country great in the first place--the American worker.
Unions not only protect the workers - they teach them safety and the proper procedures.
Very sorry to hear about your friend - - I lost 2 friends on the Olympic stadium in Atl in 96 - and the CEO of the games got their life insurance - - a little something added by ACOG - a tiny little sentence that made the employees pay all the ins premiums - but his beneficiaries never got a penny.
The money people have taken over - and they own the politicians - who are up for sale to the highest bidders - citizens be darned.
APPLE does not have unions...
DELL does not have unions
Microsoft does not have unions....
Toyota does no have unions....
Nissan does not have unions....
what workers are getting injured day and night? their safety record is par excellence.....