As President Obama traveled to the Heartland to promote the new jobs bill, Chicago families gathered on a local bridge in need of repair to deliver a jobs message of their own. The crowd of approximately 100 financially struggling Chicagoans came to the N. Wells St. bridge —one of 162 bridges in Cook County rated structurally deficient—with a clear message: Fix our jobs crisis by putting people back to work fixing our city.

“This bridge isn’t going to fix itself, and our jobs crisis isn’t going to fix itself either,” said E.J. Serrano, director of Stand Up! Chicago. “We’ve got crumbling bridges and roads in this city that desperately need to be repaired and we’ve got people who desperately need jobs. So let’s get people back to work fixing our bridges and our roads.” Serrano introduced a brief press conference at the bridge in which Marva Boyd, chief of staff of the Illinois Department of Transportation, and unemployed workers such as, Eddie Perez spoke.

While national debates have broken out about how to pay for new job creation, the answer is simple according to Eddie Perez. “The banks and corporations broke our economy and took our jobs away,” said Perez, an unemployed worker. “They broke the economy so they should fix it.” The plan, to be released the first week of October, is part of a comprehensive report on unemployment in the city.