Musings on jobs well done

Charley Pierce's labor day blog post was very much to the point of teh murky scribble I posted earlier today.  He was musing about the role of unions in the pride Americans seemed to take in their work in the middle of the last century.  The focus of his remembrance is a carousel, built in 1909, hand carved and still running in a tawdry mall in Minneapolis.  The men who carved those horses did a job for the ages, not for next week.  The same goes for the people who made our cars, our furniture and the thousands of other products we use each day.  Most of them are now made in China or Vietnam by people who work for starvation wages so we can have cheap consumer goods.  Neither the nameless masses in the far east or the American consumer has the time or the money to enjoy the fruits of their labor.  Meanwhile, even among the 12% of Americans who are still unionized, there is antagonism instead of solidarity.  It would seem the gilded age has come again and will stay as long as the sheeple allow themselves to be manipulated by the powerful.