Times can be pretty good without being perfect.

But even the best of times can collapse with just a few bad decisions.

This is where we are as a Brotherhood and a nation.

Nearly all of the numbers we use to measure our success are better now than at any point in our adult lives.

The last three years we've seen, for the first time in nearly a century, promises to working people made on a campaign trail that were actually kept once the candidate was in the White House.

And the result is what we always said it would be: record job growth for the nation and an unprecedented boom in our industries. The best three years of job growth in history, averaging nearly 300,000 new jobs a month. Unemployment has been at or below 4% for 30 months — the longest stretch in 50 years.

While most economists predicted that a recession would follow the drop in inflation, we got nothing of the kind.

In this issue of The Electrical Worker, you see where those big numbers translate into real paychecks.

Not coming tomorrow, and not hundreds of jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs, today.

People like you in towns and cities like yours in every state are setting out on work that will last for decades.

President Joe Biden bet his entire presidency on succeeding where Donald Trump failed.

And one of the places where Trump failed: rebuilding America the union way.

Nuclear plants that were shuttered are opening. (See last month's cover story.) Semiconductor plants reflecting half a trillion dollars of investment are breaking ground. Thousands of acres of solar panels and battery storage are being installed.

By May of this year, nearly $454 billion in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding had been released for 56,000 projects across 4,500 communities in all 50 states, plus D.C. and the U.S. territories.

This is just a small part of the 1.2 million new clean energy jobs — including electricians, mechanics, other construction workers, technicians and factory workers — that are here or on their way, according to a study by MIT.

I'm not blind. The economy isn't perfect.

Since the start of the pandemic, the richest 10 people in the world have gotten, on average, $1.5 billion wealthier every day, according to Oxfam. Every day.

I hear that many brothers and sisters are thinking of handing the keys back to the billionaires because, after three and a half years, the job isn't done.

But this isn't about giving a man or a party more time in power. It's about giving us more time in power.

We said that if Trump won, he'd lock us out of every room and attack our ability to earn more and stay safe.

We were right.

We said if Biden won, we'd have a seat at the table and a generation of work.

We were right both times. Let's work like hell to keep what we earned.

Also: Noble: Focused on Jobs