Labor Day special--Still delivering: The people who brought you the middle class

[proud2BlibKansan]

My grandparents were immigrants. My paternal grandfather escaped from a Tzarist prison camp. According to family legend, he was the only one who escaped who got out of Russia alive. He settled first in Philadelphia, where my father was born, and then moved to Los Angeles. He joined the ILGW, and became a shop steward. He bought a car, and a house. He became part of the middle class. His son--my father--went to a state university--UCLA--and eventually became a college professor of English, one of seven or eight languages my grandfather spoke.

This is not an unusual story. It happened tens of millions of times. It is how the American middle class was made. It wasn't capitalism that did it. Capitalism was doing just fine with a relatively tiny middle class of managers, professionals and small business owners. Well, except for that whole Great Depression thing. And repeated "panics" throughout the 1800s, as they called them back then.

No, it wasn't capitalism that made the modern American middle class.

It was unions.

more . . . http://www.openleft.com/diary/20047/labor-day-specialstill-delivering-the-people-who-brought-you-the-middle-class