Assessing Unions

THE KEY QUESTION about labor unions is whether they are good, or bad for society.Either you love labor unions, or you hate them. There is an "in between", and sometimes you hear it, but not often, not normally. The power of unions, their strength and size, has waxd and waned over the past enetury and a half, as they have alternately suffered and withstood the damage done to them from concerted attacks from the controlling corporate cutlure, and rebounded and recovered from the effects. Currently, and over the past few years, unions are eperiencing a sort of resurgance, after decades of decline under the withering assault of corporate attacks. The need for labor unions to counter the power of corporate ownership has been obvious from the very beginning of America's post Civil War industrial revolution. The war stimulated the need for a strong industrial economy to produce the metals needed for the manufacture of weapons. After the war, advances in science and technology, the birth of the steel, electrical, automotive, and coal mining industries spurred economic growth, including the growh in the number and size of companies, and the need for workers to work in the manufacturing facilities of the new factory system. The first factory workers, without unions, were treated like slaves, cattle, or worse.They were often locked inside their factories for back breaking hours at wages so low that they wre virtually slave labor, and such factory work became known as "wage slavery". Relations between labor unions an corporate ownership was strained from the start, and the first wage and labor disputes were violat affairs, with albor strikes often turning into bloodbaths as mobs of hired thugs assisted the millionaires in breaking up the strikes, which were regarded as traitorous insurrections, and force the broken workers back into the sweat shops. The union movement has, over the decades at an often painfully slow pace, transformed the lives of American wokers from miserable to what are today far superior working conditions and pay. Without unions American workers would doubtless still be virtual slaves, living in miserable impoverishment. Unions gave us weekends, and a five day forty hour work week, along with health insurance, and oher benefits. Social Security came ito being in 1935 only with strong labor union support, and Medicare and Medicaid began in the mid ninieteen sixties, again, with strong organized labor support. Because of strong labor unions America became a middle class country. The decline of the middle class, so noticebale in recent decades in the U.S., has been directly caused by the decline in labor unions, and the stagnation of worker's pay for fifty years. Perhaps now, that labor unions are onc again making their presence known in the American economy, the middle class will grow back to its former strength, their will be greater ecoomi equality in the country as there was between the end of World War Two and the nineteen seventies, and we can recapture the magic of the best economic era in American history, that between 1945 and 1970. When tens of millions of blue collar workers are underpaid, their spending power decreases, fewer goods a services are sold by American businesses, and everybody suffers. With a well paid working class, tens of millions of workers have spendable income, and they spend it on the goods and services produced by American business, to everyone's benefit. Without unsions, none of this would be possible.