When did the end begin?

Michael Moore (per Avedon Carol) on what many don't know we had, and when it all began to end. (I added all the paragraphing; I wanted to emphasize that great list of lost benefits in the now-gone post-war world.)

From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?"

They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free).

That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one.

That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer.

That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated.

Young people have heard of this mythical time - but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981."

Read that list again; it's worth your time. This really is a lost world, isn't it, a world long gone.

Moore goes on to talk about the PATCO strike, and how striking a move (no pun intended) the Reagan decision to fire all the strikers was, considering that the union supported Reagan in 1980.

By the way, notice the complicity of the AFL-CIO in that anti-union coup:

The biggest organization of unions in America told its members to cross the picket lines of the air traffic controllers and go to work. And that's just what these union members did. Union pilots, flight attendants, delivery truck drivers, baggage handlers - they all crossed the line and helped to break the strike. And union members of all stripes crossed the picket lines and continued to fly.

They did it to themselves. (This, by the way, is why the "hippies" of that day had trouble with union members. Contra Kevin Drum's analysis, hippies reached out and were rejected; welcome to the world of Reagan Democrats.)

But I want to focus primarily on that list — on the archeology of it. Again, what a stunning array of benefits. And for anyone thirty years old or less, it describes a time they've never even seen — and never will.

GP