WASHINGTON

THE JACKHAMMERS are going silent, cranes are going still. That silence is the proverbial canary in the coal mine stopping its chirping as the tentacles of the housing-market crash reach broadly throughout the economy.

The most recent jobs report in December — with unemployment reach-ing 5 percent and 49,000 jobs disappearing in construction alone — is an alarm calling for real economic stimulus to stop America’s slide into recession.

While working people in many occupations are being hit hard by unemployment, the canaries in the coal mine are the men and women who build America — those in the construction industry, a powerhouse industry of 10 million workers who produce 5 percent of the U.S. economic output.

The continued loss of jobs in residential construction, while plenty painful for thousands of families, was expected, given the crisis in the housing market. In prior months commercial construction helped to offset the job losses in residential construction. But for the first time since the housing-market crisis took hold the job loss has spread to commercial construction, which is now experiencing steep declines as well.

We need action now to stimulate the economy and one of the most efficient ways to do so is putting people back to work building America. That will not only improve the jobs report; it will make America stronger.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, our roads, schools, waterways, airports, subway and railways are crumbling and are in desperate need of repair. For America to continue to compete we must strengthen our infrastructure — reason enough to for a rebuild America program even absent the added job-market benefit.

The numbers are staggering: 27 percent of America’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, the number of unsafe dams has risen by more than 33 percent in the last 10 years, 34 percent of our major roads are in a less than satisfactory condition and traffic congestion costs American drivers $63.2 billion a year in wasted time and fuel costs.

Instead of continuing the American tradition of investing in our future, we have gone from a nation that settled the Wild West and raced to put a man on the moon to one whose citizens cannot be assured of safely crossing the Mississippi River.

If we invest in our infrastructure we can rebuild America and create jobs. In fact, with every billion dollars in federal infrastructure investment, 48,000 good, family-supporting jobs can be created. These jobs allow construction workers to earn family-supporting pay with pension and health-care benefits, a real start toward economic recovery. It helps workers in a significant and influential industry and everyone benefits.

Appallingly, President Bush and his administration are either ignoring or failing to understand the size of the economic downturn. The president’s solution to the job loss crisis is more tax cuts for the rich. And as jackhammers fall silent, there is for the most part too much silence on the presidential campaign trail and from Congress on this issue.

We cannot justify a policy that uses the pain of working people as another excuse for more tax breaks for those who do not need them. Working people are already paying too heavy a price for the president’s failed economic policies — at the gas pump, with rising mortgage costs, with escalating health-care premiums, with diminished retirement security, and, now with their jobs.

Tax breaks for the wealthy never built a bridge, they never made life more livable by easing traffic congestion, they never made flood-prone areas safer, and they never put people back to work with good jobs that rebuild our dams, schools and transportation systems.

Tax breaks for the rich don’t build America. Investing in our infrastructure does. Let’s stop the slide into recession and bring back the sounds of building America.

Terence M. O’Sullivan is general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.