I know I said I wasn't going to get into politics and this post might be seen as that. Note that it is not my intention to start conversations about partisan politics.
If you work for a living or collect Social Security, you should probably thank a union member today. Much of what we take for granted in the world of work--the 40(?) hour week, child labor laws, the more humane approaches to management and employee relations that is SOP these days, paid vacations, sick leave, and numerous other things--are ours today thanks to the work of the labor movement. States with higher percentages of unionized workers have generally higher pay rates for all.
For all the abuses of some union leaders, and the results of highly adversarial union-management situations which tend to be rigid distributive solutions, the improvement of the lot of working people owes almost everything to the union movement. True that now most companies, in the interest of avoiding being unionized, offer the benefits unions fought for. Of course now, some of those supposedly "enlightened" companies, ship work to factories in China where the buildings have nets around them to prevent suicides, and the workers are sent back to the farm when their hands become too crippled to assemble our high tech goods.
So, agree or disagree, thank a union member today anyway.
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