"Why, in MY day we worked for FREE and we were GRATEFUL fer it!!"

Will somebody please explain to me why, in the name of Christ's clanging balls, we are supposed to view the concept of collective bargaining as though it were some kind of neo-Stalinist plot to destroy America?

The new right-wing fad du jour is apparently these so-called "right-to-work" bills being pushed by Republicans in state legislatures across the country. Essentially, they're nothing more than the same tired old union busting horseshit that the right has been trying to push for decades. Now, I'll be the first to admit that unions sometimes go way overboard - convention exhibitors having to shell out close to a hundred bucks for a union guy to knock in a couple of nails to hang an exhibit booth banner is fucking nuts. Agreed. Then again, this sort of thing is hardly confined to union labor. Hell, our entire financial system is run under the concept "How much can we get away with?"

To take extreme examples like this as justification for doing away with collective bargaining altogether is beyond asinine. But damned if the right isn't trying to do exactly that.

Obviously, the wealth addicts at the very top of the pyramid are going to oppose collective bargaining or anything else that gives workers any sort of recourse as far as getting decent compensation for what they do. It's always been this way, and it always will be. They didn't voluntarily give up on child labor, they didn't voluntarily kick down the 40-hour work week or sick days or overtime pay or any of the other things that most of us take for granted at our jobs. If there is nobody forcing big business to do this shit, then the only alternative is for us to move closer and closer to third-world wages and working conditions.

Yeah, it sounds like hyperbole. But our work force is being forced to work more and more for less and less, because despite all the right-wing whining about unions, we have one of the least unionized nations in the industrialized world, with some of the weakest labor laws. Middle and working class wages have flat lined for the past 30 years, with no relief in sight. And yet, it's always the middle and lower classes who are expected to suck it up and make even more sacrifices when the wealth addicts get out of control enough to break the economy, as happened a couple of years ago.

This, if you extrapolate the far right's reasoning a wee bit, is the true American Dream as far as they're concerned. Robber barons making virtually limitless profits while everyone else just barely scrapes by with absolutely no recourse other than the ability to vote to see which politicians get to lap up lobbyist bribes whilst doing the bidding of said robber barons.

I can come up with a helluva lot of very descriptive names for that kind of thing, but "American Dream" doesn't even make the first cut.