My Father Built This: A Labor Day Reflection for 2025
My father was a construction electrician. After serving in the Army Air Force in North Africa during World War II, he came home, attended trade school on the GI Bill, and apprenticed through IBEW Local 134. With nothing more than a high school diploma and a union card, he built a life that gave our family dignity and stability.
He worked long hours, always chasing “overtime” and especially the coveted “double bubble” holiday shifts. When we’d go downtown, he would point to the skyline he had helped wire: the Sears Tower, the AON Building, the John Hancock, McCormick Place. He helped expand O’Hare Airport and built classrooms at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He was a proud union man and a proud Democrat. He taught us that unions made our lives possible. When he died, the IBEW didn’t forget him—or my mother, who was legally blind. His pension and health benefits helped her live independently. That was solidarity in action.
The Fight in 2025
Today, we’re in danger of losing exactly what my father’s generation fought so hard to secure.
Workers are once again on the frontlines, from UAW strikers to Starbucks baristas, demanding living wages and safe workplaces. And yet, we have a president and a political movement openly hostile to labor.
Project 2025—the far-right blueprint now embraced by Donald Trump and pushed by his inner circle, including Stephen Miller and former OMB head Russ Vought—proposes dismantling worker protections, gutting the Department of Labor, and weakening OSHA. It’s a gift to corporate America at the expense of working Americans.
The goal is clear: shift power away from the many who build this country and hand it to the few who profit from it.
What We Forget at Our Peril
We deride China’s cheap labor, but it wasn’t so long ago that American workers toiled in deadly sweatshops, their lives expendable. It was unions that ended child labor, won the eight-hour day, secured safety standards, and carved out the middle class.
And yet in 2025, wages remain stagnant while CEO pay soars. Workers are told to be grateful they have jobs at all while corporations automate, outsource, and squeeze every penny from labor. Without unions, it will only get worse.
Unions are not relics—they are democracy in action. They are the check on concentrated power. They are how ordinary people—nurses, electricians, teachers, drivers—stand up to the billionaires who would rather pocket the profits than share the gains.
A Brick and a Legacy
When I was in college, my dad handed me a single alabaster brick from the Standard Oil Building job site. He had just helped finish its electrical work. “I helped build this,” he told me. “Keep it, and someday show it to your kids so they know their grandfather helped build this city.”
That brick still sits on my shelf. It reminds me that no skyscraper, no business, no nation is built alone. It takes workers. It takes unions. It takes roads, schools, public investment, and shared sacrifice.
So when Republicans say “I built this” or when Trump’s allies claim that government should get out of the way, I think of that brick. My father didn’t build Chicago’s skyline alone—but without him, and the countless others like him, there would be no skyline at all.
This Labor Day
This Labor Day, in the shadow of a second Trump administration openly bent on dismantling unions and stripping workers of hard-won rights, let’s remember what my father knew:
Nobody builds anything alone.
Unions are not the enemy.
And the middle class doesn’t survive without them.
My father’s hands helped shape a city. The question in 2025 is whether we still value the hands that shape our nation—or whether we will let greed and authoritarianism undo the legacy of generations of working people.