This month’s cover story highlights one of the best labor-management relationships in the manufacturing industry. The teamwork between Lynchburg, Va., Local 2173 and Delta Star is a model of how organized labor working with ambitious management can create a partnership that works for everyone’s benefit.

It shouldn’t be extraordinary.

Workers who are well represented, well treated, fairly compensated, protected and empowered to speak plainly to managers were never a majority of the manufacturing workforce.

But when America was strongest, most confident, most fair and most creative, union factory workers were its foundation.

Let’s look at where we are now.

Four years ago, we began work on an ambitious manufacturing plan for the U.S. through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act.

We were expecting tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. We were planning for tens of thousands of construction jobs building new factories.

Now that momentum is in jeopardy as the current administration acts to reverse the most serious investment in our nation’s competitiveness in decades.

Manufacturing jobs were the gold standard 50 years ago because so many paid well, had good benefits and provided a pension and job security.

But today’s nonunion manufacturing jobs are little different from every other industry where workers were made disposable: low wages, no job security, perilous safety conditions.

What makes manufacturing jobs good jobs is the union.

I know it is a hard time to take on manufacturing organizing. Even under the most union-friendly administration of my life, we took painful losses. Campaigns driven by hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers fell short.

Organizing the worst of the manufacturing industry’s exploitative employers might not be in the cards. But the low productivity, terrible wages and low morale of those companies have created an opportunity, a tool that every local should be using with ambitious companies that are aiming to grab some of the pie for themselves.

The Clean Technology Training Trust, which grew out of efforts in the Fourth and Ninth Districts, will work with any company to create an IBEW-backed training program tailored to their needs. We wrote about this in the August Electrical Worker.

I want each of you to go back and read up on what it offers. So many tools have been taken out of our hands by politicians. But our power doesn’t come from government rules and regulations.

It comes from leveraging the power of our members to help all working people in our industry live a better life.

I’m asking you to look around. Union membership is below 10% of the total workforce. This is not a time to rest in comfort.

This is the time to ignore the politicians and naysayers and help restore North American manufacturing as the envy of the world and a foundation of the middle class.