My family's union support go back some time. Not sure if it began with my grandmother, an original FDR Democrat, or before. But a defining event was probably my great-grandfather, who lost fingers and an eye in an industrial accident. He had been a craftsman in the old country, making furniture. In the US he worked in a factory, with the usual results that happened in pre-union days.

I never knew him so I don't know if this incident led him to support unionization, but I do know my grandmother was a solid union supporter and Democrat until the day she died and she passed this on to my mother and through her to my brother and me. In her wilder days my grandmother even had a brief marriage to a communist. My mother focused her radicalism on feminism in the days of the ERA.

My son seems to be picking up the same radical tendencies of my grandmother, brother and mother. By comparison I am a moderate.

It started with Woodie Guthrie. My son fell in love with "This Land is my Land," particularly the Woodie Guthrie version, though I think the first version he heard was the Bruce Springsteen version sung at a rally for Barack Obama. As I was, at his request, looking for other Woodie Guthrie songs we came across Billy Bragg and others singing "I'm Sticking to the Union" at the 90th birthday of Pete Seeger. My son is now playing it over and over and singing the first several lines (the ones sung by Billy Bragg). Here it is:

There considerable resonance in this to me. My mother used to sing union songs (in a bad voice, but what the hell). She introduced me to the songs of Pete Seeger and the Weavers, a blacklisted group from the good days of Folk Music when Woodie Guthrie's working class music wasn't yet replaced by the later, more self-important and strident versions I can't stand even when sung by a voice as wonderful as Joan Baez'. And Billy Bragg is someone I was largely unaware of until hearing him on the IFC program my distant cousin, Henry Rollins, hosted. Here is Billy Bragg on Henry Rollins' show and my introduction to his music:

Somehow it feels right hearing my son belt out: "There once was a union maid, who never was afraid, Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid..." along with Billy Bragg.

Just goes to show, my family's liberal to the core. And damned proud of it.

My wife, from a similar old-Jewish radical background of course, had a role as well. After all, she's the one who taught him that Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger were "supervillians."

Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO speaking to all working class Americans.

McCain and Palin like to talk about "Joe Six Pack," to use Palin's term, but Obama actually knows what working and middle class Americans go through.

Let me add a quote from the conservative newspaper, the Stockton Record, on this point:

Republicans have tried repeatedly to paint Obama as an elitist. Hardly. He grew up in a single-parent home and, by the sheer force of his desire and cerebral horsepower, ended up at Harvard Law School, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review.

He could have gone for the money. He didn't. He went to Chicago, where he worked to give a voice to those who didn't have one.

That's hardly the mark of an elitist.
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On March 25th 1911 (sorry, should have posted this yesterday!), 146 people died in the very building I work in. The result of their deaths was the rapid growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the real beginning of the fight against sweatshops. It also was the beginning of fire regulations in American cities.

The story of the fire and the missed opportunities to prevent it are chilling. But what is more chilling is the fact that America has forgotten why we need unions. Even some unions have forgotten what unions are all about, but I want everyone who doubts the need for unions to remember the events of March 25, 1911.

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I work in what is now known as the Brown Building at NYU. But in 1911 it was the Asch building. The top three floors of the Asch building comprised the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. For the record, a shirtwaist is essentially a woman's blouse. I work a couple of floors below where the factory was. Today I look out my lab's window and I see the annual commemoration of those who died in 1911.

This factory employed some 500 workers, mostly young women immigrants. The working conditions were essentially sweatshop conditions with fourteen-hour workdays and a 60- to 72-hour workweek. It was also a death trap. Workers of course smoked and lighting was from gas lighting...and, of course, the clothing was flammable. But it was even worse due to management distrust of the workers. One of the two exit stairs was locked to keep workers from taking breaks. The fire escape was substandard. And working conditions were crowded.