Unions

Demonization of unions puzzles me. Except for public employees unions, most American labor organizations have lost their teeth.

Institutions that secured workers on-the-job safety standards, the 40-hour work week, unemployment insurance, workers compensation, minimum wage standards are barely relevant in the age of Wal-Mart.

What good is a 40-hour work week when workers need two or three jobs to meet minimum living standards? What purpose does a minimum wage that fails to provide for the most basic needs of existence serve? What role does a National Labor Relations Board play when employers are allowed to terminate employees who attempt to organize?

How effective is unemployment insurance when workers cannot find replacement jobs for months or years? What bargaining chips do unions have when 15 million Americans are unemployed and millions more have been forced to accept underemployment?

Even public sector unions are feeling the bite. Privatization of traditionally public sector jobs is gaining momentum. Years of bloated, unsustainable budgets have made deep state and local government cuts inevitable.

Did the unions play a role in their decline? Yes. Frivolous strikes. Demands that were unsustainable for their industries. Leaders who forgot who they represented. Corruption. But no other institutions so ably represented the American working stiff (the "small" people).

Who else cared about nurses being forced to work long, arduous double shifts? On-the-job haz-mat protection? Whistle-blower protection? Child labor? Teachers confronting violence in the classroom and huge class sizes? Air traffic controllers working under agonizingly stressful, understaffed conditions (does anyone even remember THEIR superhuman efforts on 9/11)?

From the day the Great Communicator fired the striking air traffic controllers, the handwriting was written on the wall: "the 'small' people have no place in the shining city on the hill."