Wage growth, benefits, length of the work week, proportion of GDP owned by the working and middle classes--all kept moving in worker-friendly directions as long as unionization was on the increase. Then came 1980, and the election of Ronald Reagan, who broke the air traffic controller's union (PATCO), and set the trend for a downward spiral ever after. Note that the election of Clinton in 1992 may have slightly slowed the decline for a brief while, but certainly didn't reverse it. The joke is not just on the blue-collar work force; the fortunes of the white-collar crowd have pretty much followed the same trajectory, although all too few of them realize the link between their own welfare and that of the people they see as professionally "beneath" them.
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