Have we forgotten the struggles for our rights?

“How’d he get on the Daily Show?”

I often ask myself this. No matter how much I try to pretend there isn’t, there is some bitterness in the thought. Some, “I wrote a book that’s serious and funny about a subject very relevant to now, and I didn’t get on the Daily Show.” Hrmph!

Last night Philip Dray was on the Daily Show talking about his 784-page book on the fight for worker’s rights: There is Power in a Union. Last night during the show I checked Amazon. The book was ranked 35,000-something. This morning it is in the hundreds. After my five-second pity party about “that shoulda been me” I got to thinking about this.

Is a book on unions good for ratings? Probably not.

Wouldn’t it be…

At Home in Utopia

With GM and Chrylser going bankrupt there’s a lot of blame that gets directed towards unions.  Unionized labor at GM costs $71 per hour.  In comparions Toyota has no unions and their labor cost is only $47 per hour.

Joann Muller wrote a great piece in Forbes on why the unions aren’t to blame.  She writes that one of the major expenses GM faces aren’t employees being paid that much more than the workers at Japanese automakers, but the legacy costs.

it’s misleading to suggest that Detroit autoworkers are paid $71 an hour. About $17 of that is the cost of health care insurance for retirees. General Motors has 442,000 retirees in North America, four times as many current employees. Toyota has only 371 retirees in…