Labor and other pains.

This piece may make you sad, especially if you are like me and believe the unions and their members played the critical role in building the infrastructure of this country. And like that infrastructure, the unions are crumbling to nothing.

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=5328

I carry a union card and pay my dues to the A.F.M. (American Federation of Musicians). Mostly, I do that as a matter of pride and principle. Now, how much effect it has on whether I get work from one week to the next; that’s another story I will reserve for a later rant.

In the mid 1980’s, a very eccentric retired engineer told me that if we keep busting up the unions and continue to allow our education system to crumble, our country would resemble a third-world nation controlled by the ultra-rich. I was young and full of myself then, and I passed it off as the paranoia of an old man. Not realizing what I would face in the working world in the next few years, I was confident that the U.S. would always be that comfy place where Walter Kronkite came on the tube every night to tell us “And that’s the way it is.” Now I am beginning to think that old dude wasn’t so wrong after all.