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E-mail	Print	Subscribe to magazine		March 16, 2010

Equipment Workers Rally in Chicago, Call Out for Funding

October 23, 2009

By Andrew Baltazar, Associate Editor

Equipment workers take part in the Start Us Up USA! rally at Soldier Field

Heavy equipment workers on Tuesday assembled outside Chicago's Soldier Field in an effort to convince the federal government to renew a transportation bill that would provide much-needed funding to road builders.

Led by the Associated Equipment Distributors and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, operators, mechanics and managers from equipment dealers and suppliers around Chicago spoke up about the challenges they have faced over the last few months as a result of the recession and insufficient funding.

Later, a caravan of trucks carried several pieces of heavy equipment around Museum Campus to show the effect that idle, non-working equipment would have on the city's infrastructure.

Here's what some rally participants had to say:

Jerry Lodovisi, sales manager at Illini Hi-Reach:
"I got into the workforce in the early '80s when things were really tough. This time it's severely worse. There are people out of work who now really have nowhere else to go, and it's pretty sad. What I see on the news and everywhere else is how the insurance companies got their bailout and how the banks got their bailout. But it doesn't seem like there's anything trickling down to our end."

Mark Bjork, mechanic at West Side Tractor Sales:
"It's been hard. We're down to 32 hours, and a lot of people will possibly get laid off soon. We've got one or two pieces of equipment in our shop. Other than that, our shop is empty. There's nothing coming in. It's bad going to worse."

David Deck, mechanic at West Side Tractor Sales:
"I work mostly on paving equipment, and most of it is sitting still. We normally have a line out the door with customers waiting for them to be worked on. We have customers with thousands to millions of dollars worth of equipment sitting in a yard. They haven't used them in a year. If you have a half-million dollar piece of equipment that's not moving, then it's not making them any money. So they have to either sell it or let it sit, and that doesn't bring us any work."

Toby Mack, president and CEO of Associated Equipment Distributors:
"While the broader economy may have begun to recover from the great recession, our industry is still in a depression. There's nothing else you can call it when a major sector of the economy has lost 37 percent of its workforce, and an industry's economic output contracts by 40 percent nationwide just in the last 18 months."

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E-mail	Print	Subscribe to magazine		March 16, 2010

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Equipment Workers Rally in Chicago, Call Out for Funding

October 23, 2009

By Andrew Baltazar, Associate Editor

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