ARRA: Restoring jobs, self-worth
I-5 Port of Tacoma Road to King County Line HOV
August 28, 2009
issue of the WSDOT Express Lane.
When work dried up, life went on. A wife battled cancer, a child was conceived, an aging relative required care, and strong men did their best to hold things together, despite being jobless and, at times, hopeless.
“You shouldn’t feel like less of a man, but you do,” said Erik Buholm, a 35-year-old Lacey man with a wife, a 3-year-old daughter, and a baby on the way. Buholm has been out of work for nearly a year. That is, until now.
Hope has returned in the form of jobs for Buholm and several otherlaborers who are back at work, earning their paychecks and self respect on WSDOT’s I-5 Port of Tacoma Road to King County Line HOV project.
The two-year freeway widening project is largely funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, an effort to jumpstart our economy and create or save millions of jobs.
Buholm and several others from Laborers’ Local 252 (Tacoma), who are back on the job after months of idleness, offered a few minutes one recent morning before starting work to talk about their struggles, and what these federal-stimulus jobs mean
to them.
Dean Libhart of Tacoma is married and has a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old at home.
“This (job) is a godsend for my family,” Libhart said. Michael Joseph, a 53-year-old Spanaway man who has worked four months out of the last 12, said: “I just about started crying (when I landed the job).”
Times have been particularly trying for Joseph, whose wife is fighting cancer.
“She’s in and out of remission,” Joseph said. “For me, health care is everything.” And without work, keeping up with health care costs is close to impossible.
And not just for Joseph. With a young child and another on the way, Buholm worried about how he was going to pay for proper medical care.
“It was getting to the point where I was sweating bullets,” Buholm said. Now he’s pleased to be sweating at work.
Charles Graham, 44, of Key Center, is a single father of an 11-year-old daughter and he takes care of his 63-year-old mother. For more than two decades, he found steady work. That all changed November 7, 2008, the last day Graham worked before starting this new job.
In 21 years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Graham said. For Graham, the new job offers multiple benefits. He gets a paycheck, he can pay for health care, and he can accumulate work hours so if his job disappears next year, he can at
least collect unemployment checks. But that’s not what Graham wants. In fact, all of these men are willing and able to work, and say they would much rather earn a paycheck for a hard day’s labor than use the social services that have helped them survive–barely.
“The $21 a month in food stamps doesn’t even pay for the milk,” Libhart said. “I had never been to a food bank before. You have to do what you have to do, but it’s kind of embarrassing.”
That was yesterday.
Today, Libhart and the others were up before dawn, dressed in hard hats and vests, prideful looks in their eyes.
No more time to talk. The trucks are pulling out and these guys need to get to work.