As published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 30, 2010

Among the highest skilled of the St. Louis construction trades are the more than 4,000 electricians and communication technicians with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local One. Energizing all types of residential and commercial properties across St. Louis since our founding here in 1891, our skills also have proven essential to delivering massive projects of ever-increasing technical complexity.

These include health care, manufacturing, energy, scientific research and more. And as cities across the country compete for high-tech industries of the future, including renewable energy, it is a collective skill that is one of St. Louis' greatest assets.

Unfortunately, this asset is in distress - struggling with more than 30 percent unemployment because of a devastated construction market. The impact is more than just a missed paycheck. Some workers have been out of work for 18 months. Despair is setting in. Families are fracturing. The result is that St. Louis faces a "brain drain" as highly skilled electricians and communication technicians drift out of the region or out of the profession altogether in a desperate search for work.

They see little hope in the incessant promise of stimulus funding to create "jobs for the future." They are frustrated with a dysfunctional political landscape that keeps the nation from uniting behind the example set by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s - a singular focus on creating jobs to produce a built environment that endures to this day in our cities and our national and state park systems.

If St. Louis has any hope of becoming a destination for equally enduring high-tech industries, including renewable energy manufacturing, it needs a highly skilled workforce to build and service it. We know this because our labor-management organization, the Electrical Connection, travels the country to recruit these industries to St. Louis. Again and again, these expansion-minded employers emphasize their projects require high-order skills to build and maintain their facilities and systems. St. Louis has those skills as a result of the $30 million annually invested by the Electrical Connection, a partnership between Local One of the IBEW and the St. Louis Chapter, National Electrical Contractors Association, in apprenticeship and journey-level training. Other local union construction trades and contractors make substantial investments as well.

In the early 1990s, IBEW and NECA expanded the curriculum at the St. Louis Electrical Industry Training Center to train our entire workforce in the burgeoning markets of smart building technologies, advanced process controls and fiber optics. In 1999, we again invested heavily to upgrade our training center as a technological explosion changed how we exchanged ideas and improved the built environment.

As a result, our apprentices and journeymen were equipped to install the technology that drove modern industry in the last decade. This extraordinary work took shape in MasterCard's Global Technology and Operations Center in O'Fallon, capable of processing 20 million transactions daily; the Holcim Cement Plant near Ste. Genevieve, the world's largest single kiln cement plant; the Emerson Data Center in Ferguson, with the largest solar panel array in Missouri; Lumiere Place Casino and Hotel downtown; and ironically, countless tech-upgrade retrofits for manufacturers now gone silent, such as the auto industry.

That silence was one more reason to again adapt. Fortunately, as we entered the new millennium, we fine tuned our already extensive green training program and now stand ready to build renewable energy projects. And yet we wait with more than 1,100 workers out of work, contemplating a future that fails to build our hometown.

If St. Louis' capacity to offer a world-class work force to build high tech industries is diminished, it will be replaced by the under-skilled -- not a selling point for businesses to locate here. It takes at least four years and 8,000 hours of training at the Electrical Industry Training Center to deliver the brainpower and skill set that job creators of today and tomorrow seek. But unless the promise of jobs in the high-tech arena becomes reality, the current IBEW workforce of more than 4,000 skilled and ready workers will languish. And so will St. Louis' future.

We stand ready again to deploy this tremendous and unique asset for St. Louis. All we ask is that political, civic and business leadership unite as they did 75 years ago to deliver a sensible and sustainable jobs program upon which to build St. Louis' future.

Stephen P. Schoemehl is business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local One and labor co-chairman of the Electrical Connection.