American Workers Have Lost Or Given Up Just About Every Gain Made By Unions In

[HiPointDem]

8. that is pretty damning. i think you should work up an OP, because knowing this is important.

i have certainly noticed the change since the 80s in my neck of the woods, a small town which used to be heavily unionized, lots of factory work. it was a good place to grow up when i was a kid. today it's basically a rural ghetto -- lots of drugs, mostly scut work with a veneer of professional work (health care, mainly, though even there most of the employment is scut work) -- very white, but unemployment higher than the state average, low wages, temp, contract, all the things you pointed out. also lots of social service agencies which don't really do anything meaningful except monitor & control people and provide jobs to the professional veneer, who are always lamenting how disgusting the people they monitor are.

in fact, the change made me draw analogies between my own community & the process of 'ghettoization' in the inner cities, which also used to be working-class centers of productive activity. the people with the means move on and the residual population is inexorably drawn into self-defeating activity and self-hatred. and when the jobs left, the drugs came in, almost as if by magic.