I'd like to collect all the stories about the horrible Unions and compare them with all the stories about stock brokers, hedge fund managers, trustifarians and others representative of those classes who produce nothing. Let's start with the Union stuff though. We have to hurry because Union membership is down from a high of about 35% to less than 7%. The effort is worthy as at least one union man or woman must have done something because just look at all those cars all that coal, all that steel, all those educated kids, all those skyscrapers.

Here is a typical story, this one told by an iBrattleboro contributor, which you might have missed because the story was dead. "He (a Steelworker?) told me of a story about how the union guys would place a rock between the belly pan and the oil pan of the gravel processors." (Sabotage to avoid work) This is quite typical of these stories, told by an unidentified someone to someone else who has never been in a union and expresses hostility. This thread could extend over to all those jokes about DPW workers with 9 guys standing around with one guy in the trench digging. Pretty funny to anyone who has never been in a trench and hit in the back of the head by some other clod's shovel. There is so much of this crap in everyone's head that even I have to tamp it down and I was in fact a Steelworker for a period of time.

Here are things that unions have done. Raised wages. Instituted work safety. Ended child labor. Created the middle class out of low wage uneducated (for the most part) members. Ended the 10-12 hour day and the 6 and 7 day work week. Fought for a minimum wage.Helped to end vertical monopolies. Created the idea of benefits - most particularly health care. Creation of the expectation of retirement benefits. Life insurance. Disability benefits. Paid leave. End of child labor.

Conveniently forgotten is that these benefits didn't occur in upper management before unions aggitated for them at the blue collar level. If unions had not fought for them none of us would have them. Couldn't very well let that dirty fingernail crowd get ahead of the bosses, now could we?

So tell me all your second hand featherbedding stories, make work stories, laziness stories, Democratic corruption of election through unions stories, apprenticeship limits entry stories and on and on. Be sure though that you were there. Otherwise they are about as useless as those stories about stock brokers jumping out of the Empire State Building on Black Friday 1929. Later, we'll get on to all the paper shuffling, reposession of homes and other examples of usury.