”Enjoy a 40-hour week? An eight-hour-day? Saturdays and Sundays off? Health-care benefits? Workers comp if you’re injured on the job? The fact that your nine-year-old child doesn’t have to work long days in a sweat shop? Thank unions. Even if you were never a member, you benefited because, first, union efforts changed the law; then, even non-union employers had to adopt these practices to compete, and finally because it became a standard of American decency held by most, from capitalist baron to line worker. It created the greatest middle class in history. It has taken 25 years of complacency, bipartisan greed and hard work by the reactionary right to undo these achievements. This all happened in a country of such affluence — created by this delicate pluralistic balance — that few people noticed. First they came for the electronics workers. Then the air traffic controllers. Then the steelworkers. But that was always somebody else. You were told by the talk-radio Goebbelses that these were “buggywhip maker losers” who needed to stop whining. You were told that everything you had you made on your own, with no debt to history or to others. Guess what: Now they’re coming for you, baby.

Rogue Columnist (via azspot)