By UTU International President Paul Thompson

As many of you did on Tuesday night, I watched the president’s State of the Union speech, and afterward chatted by phone with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. We shared a single conclusion: As far as America’s working families are concerned, the state of the union is not healthy.

We spoke of how working families are fed up with business as usual in the Congress, and how many in Washington have lost touch with the reality facing working families today, who struggle to pay the bills, who worry about their children’s and grandchildren’s future employment prospects, and who fear that health care insurance -- if they even have it -- will become unaffordable or lost.

As proof, we need look no further than members of UTU Local 1741 in San Francisco, where employer Laidlaw last week slapped a 760 percent increase in health-care cost-sharing on employees who drive school buses. 

As President Sweeney said to me, "What we have in America today is an economy that benefits Wall Street and not Main Street." Working families are being left behind as wages remain stagnant, personal debt skyrockets, good jobs continue to be shipped overseas, and any hope of a secure retirement is fading faster than morale in the workplace.

The message American voters sent lawmakers in November was that it’s time to end the tax breaks for the wealthy, close the loopholes being exploited by the oil industry and big business, and focus on retaining American jobs, extending health-care insurance to the tens of millions of Americans who have none, and making that health-care insurance affordable to working families.  

While other nations pursue trade policies that create higher-paying jobs, America has pursued trade policies that are destroying our manufacturing base, eroding the middle class and creating dead-end, low-paying service jobs that provide few, if any, benefits. Over the past six years, more than three million American jobs have been exported.

Thank goodness for Railroad Retirement, which railroads cannot eliminate over shrimp cocktails and steak at a board of directors meeting. But our members employed in the bus and airline industries -- indeed, most American workers -- are seeing their pension benefits and pension plans slashed.

Every American should be outraged that Congress literally encourages the import of about every product -- except, of course, prescription drugs, which often cost far more in the U.S. than in other countries. How scandolous that it is easier for illegal immigrants and cocaine to slip across our borders than for sick Americans to import lower-priced prescription drugs from Canada. Is that what government of the people, by the people and for the people means? I think not.

President Bush speaks about exporting democracy around the world. Yet his own administration is working to destroy workplace democracy in America. Everyday, employers intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire employees who seek union representation in the workplace. Even in unionized workplaces -- and railroads are a shocking example -- employers are able to get away with intimidating and harassing employees who are injured on the job or complain about being ordered to violate safety laws and regulations.

As President Sweeney said to me Tuesday night, "America’s workers are frustrated by the destruction of good jobs, spiraling health care costs, slashed pensions and the rapidly vanishing middle class. It is time for all of America’s elected leaders to stand up for working people."

Absolutely. And I think you agree, as well.