John Sweeney

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As the housing market and sky-high CEO year-end bonuses make current business headlines, let's not lose sight of the major theme of 2006: It was a rocky time for most working families. Health care continued to be chipped away. Jobs and retirements disappeared. College was less affordable. Eye-popping gas prices crowded out other necessities.

In fact, the wheels of commerce have nearly rusted shut for working people. They've found it harder and harder to afford a middle-class life, while leaders in Washington, D.C., looked the other way and attended to the needs of big business. Since President Bush took office, hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate tax cuts were signed, sealed and delivered by the Republican-led Congress — a Congress that logged fewer days in office than the infamous "Do-Nothing Congress" of 1948.

Working families took a big step in the right direction on Election Day 2006 when we said "ENOUGH." On Nov. 7, working-class voters fired the Do-Nothing 109th Congress and reminded our representatives that they work for us. Working men and women mobilized to bring elected leaders into office who understand our concerns, and now we're organizing to support their efforts for a new direction in 2007.

A top priority for working families is raising the minimum wage. For 10 years, the minimum wage has been stuck at a pitiful $5.15 and Congress has done nothing. It's time — way past time — for a-no-strings-attached federal minimum wage of $7.25.

At a time when working people are struggling to keep a toehold on the middle class, the single best anti-poverty device in our nation is a union card. In fact, more than half of people who don't already have a union say they would join one tomorrow if given the chance — but too few people ever get that chance because employers routinely intimidate, and even illegally fire, workers who try to form unions. Legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act would restore workers' freedom to make their own decision to form a union.

For too long, working-family issues like quality health care and education, retirement security and good jobs have been on the chopping block. We are now in the fight of our lives to get our country back on track.

The United States has some of the best health care in the world. Yet, close to 47 million Americans can't afford to go to the doctor. In Arizona alone, it is estimated that more than 1 million people don't have health care. One of the first orders of business of our new Congress must be to begin work to provide real solutions to the health-care crisis in our country.

Our representatives must stop rewarding companies for sending jobs oversees. In the last five years, Arizona has lost 28,600 good, family-supporting manufacturing jobs. Congress needs to pass laws to reward companies for keeping good jobs in the United States, not sending them away.

America's workers deserve a secure, dignified retirement. Let's write new plans to provide real retirement security for America's greatest generation, starting with reforming corporate bankruptcy laws that enable companies to dump their obligations to employees and retirees.

Finally, we need a plan to bring the troops home from Iraq as soon as possible. Our sons and daughters are dying without an exit strategy and without viable options.

America hasn't been working the way it should. On Election Day, working families tightened the screws and called for an overhaul. We look forward to a Congress that will fight for a well-oiled America that works for all of American working families.