Somewhere in there is a burger covered in cheese. A Bacon Cheese Burger with Avocado, Tomato, and Sprouts. Alfalfa sprouts.

Heaven.

This is our luncheon salute to The Holiday. Our main meal is going to be Chinese – because that’s where all the jobs have gone. We did a shopping trek to a big Asian market yesterday. Pork buns, chow mein, and sweet and sour…

Labor Day. Back in my youth, it was a day of parades with union members marching and the crowds yelling and applauding. It was when we had a real middle class – fueled by union workers making American products – that Americans – and people throughout the world – bought.

And then, companies decided to make things overseas because it was cheaper to have children in other countries make our products rather than people with children here at home.

And people with low-paying jobs started hating unions because they made more money than they did – and didn’t seem to have to work as unsafe or difficult, without necessary equipment or supplies or as many hours. People with high-paying jobs hated the unions because they demanded simple things like a safe work environment or decent health care or retirement for the workers.

My father was a proud union firefighter. I  was in unions in my youth but spent most of my career in management – usually in union shops. Some of the best employees I ever had were union members. I’d take a union property over a non-union property, anytime.

The eight-hour day. Overtime. Holiday pay. Sick leave.

All of the things we have taken for granted and are now having taken away.

And now unions are reviled because they are being blamed for every job that has been sent to China. For the cost of education. For the cost of putting out a fire in your home.

It ain’t the Unions, boys and girls. It’s the Greed on Wall Street that demands corporate profits be higher and higher every year, that forces businesses to meet some paper-pushing nitwit’s ‘projections’ for what they think they should be doing – their market-share – instead of allowing them to just do a good job, make a decent product, and sell it at a competitive price.

Or, better yet, do what Bain Capital does and saddle a perfectly good, solid company with debt, take millions for yourself, and then close the company and sell of its parts – and then blame the workers.

The only people fighting for working Americans are Unions.

Far from being the enemy, they are the only thing standing in the way of 12-year old kids working in coal mines, again.