Though behind in fringe benefits why does Toyota and other foreign auto manufacturers located here are on a par —in some even exceed— in wages with the Big Three? The simple answer is the long-lived strategy of keeping up or one step head of organized workers. Little credit is ever given to unions for instigating a universal awareness of workers’ rights for the past eighty years while simultaneously relegating the concept to class warfare, which in reality doesn’t exist.

Not unlike the "war on terror" shotgunning threats from widening circles, class warfare is a generic term to obfuscate the issue of a very real problem of shortchanging millions of working people. We all thank God or Christopher Hitchens’ imponderable ghost when we can wrench from society a decent, relatively worry-free job and never once think that there are so many not so blest. When one reaches the plane of even mild success through hard and smart work it is somehow translated into "I can do better than you … because I put my shoulder to the wheel and you don’t." We fail to acknowledge that other lowlife workers strive as much as we for that worry-free haven but the system under which he strives offers no such haven even though that very blind alley system underpins the very haven in which we prosper. Surely, we cannot realistically expect the many hard labor branches requiring minimal skills to break through society’s barriers of true success by way of the usual claptrap of improved neighborhoods, healthcare, child-rearing and schools. These are self-evident values in themselves, together with better wages, and should be permanently instituted in an enlightened society, except it is construed as class warfare, just as the GI Bill dared to break the college and home ownership barrier, and the unions dared move the needle of its members toward middle income.

It is clear, then, the credit owed to unions is lost, and the age of unions is over. What is needed —the more glamorous excepted— is an awareness that all labor be dignified and not looked down on and that political action should be launched to ensure inalienable bargaining rights for all workers.