From Deseret News archives:
Utah electrician gets look at U.S. job plight
Wednesday the group ended its weeklong publicity tour — which stopped in 18 cities and traveled through 13 states — with a rally outside a Washington hotel where Bush was holding a fund-raiser.
Christensen told the Deseret Morning News that if he could talk personally to Bush he would say, "Show us the jobs. You keep saying you're creating jobs, but I'm not seeing them."
The "Show Us the Jobs" tour is sponsored by the AFL-CIO union and the Working America advocacy group. Christensen, a member of the executive board of his local electricians' union, was chosen to represent Utah.
"I've worked a total of 12 months since January of 2002. The last time I did work was down in Ephraim — that's two hours from where I live, and it was for a substantially lower rate than I usually receive," he said, adding he feels other construction workers in the state face similar problems.
"I've never seen it this bad" in 19 years as an electrician, he said, noting that even his unemployment benefits ran out in January. "Businesses just are not building, even though the economy is supposedly improving."
Boyce, 39, said that makes it difficult to support his wife and four children, ages 14, 12, 10 and 8. To keep up his mortgage and health insurance, "I'm pulling money out of my 401(k), and I've borrowed money from my mom, who is a widow," he said.
"If there is a recovery, we're not participating. We do not shop. We do not buy things. We make do with hand-me-downs. We're not spending to help the economy along," Boyce said.
As he listened to other unemployed people tell their stories at stops through the Midwest and Northeast over the past week, Boyce said, "There has not been a day go by that I haven't cried about the plight of the people everywhere. When I got on this tour, it was about me. I think about four days ago we started talking how it isn't about 'me' or any one of us. It's about the nation."
The group also had a press conference Wednesday with such Democratic leaders as Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. For months those legislators have attacked Bush for a "jobless" recovery that has seen 2.2 million jobs disappear nationally since he took office.
What would Christensen suggest Bush do to help create more jobs?
"We've had many discussions about that among ourselves," he said. "It seems that outsourcing (companies moving jobs abroad, where wages are lower) seems to be the main culprit. If you penalize the businesses that took their work somewhere else, or at least didn't give them the favored status that they have had, it would help."
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