When I was nine years old, I was somehow acutely aware of the air traffic controller labor union being broken up by then-President Reagan. My mom and I spent a lot of time ferrying my father back and forth to Los Angeles International Airport, where he'd take off to places like Chicago, New York and other cities for work. I didn't know what a labor union was, or what the word "deregulation" meant, but I did know that there were people up in those towers responsible for getting my dad to and from his destinations safely. And if somebody, even if it was the president, was threatening them, they were threatening my family.



The current assault on organized labor isn't hitting as close to home for me as the PATCO-Reagan battle, but it is opening my eyes to the fundamental flaws of our sociopoliticaleconomic system.

So you take a piece of tree branch and chop it out of the tree. Until you put effort into making that branch into an axe handle, it doesn't have value to anybody else except maybe as firewood. Once you've got that axe handle you've got something to sell to somebody else because they can use that axe handle without having put in their own effort to chop down a tree branch, etc. The selling of that axe handle and the assigning of value to that axe handle are parts of the equation that are so ripe to be exploited and thus have been throughout US history. Corporations, with the Federal government backing them up through legislation, have always tried to keep labor costs down while living off of the money generated by the corporation's ability to sell and assign value to products. To be clear, selling and assigning value includes the legimate businesses of marketing, shipping, packaging and other labor-intensive efforts. But as we now see, driving down the labor costs can become dangerous to the whole environment where this axe handle company supposedly operates.

For years we've been hearing about the rich getting richer and the growing gap between rich and poor. It's clear now that too much of that circulating wealth has accumulated at the top where it can't do any good. Too many of the people that are ultra removed from the labor element of business have come up short on too many of their risky moves --in their efforts to sell and assign value of those axe handles-- that now the people who actually make and do things have to be terminated. It's not enough to say "oh rich people" don't get it. Of course they don't. But it's HOW they don't get it, that ruins the life of a hardworker, who may have dreams of striking it rich one day, but in the meantime feels entitled to just get by.

Whether you're talking autoworkers in Michigan, schoolteachers in California or IT personnel in New York, these are people who were doing what they were told --what they had to do if they wanted to keep their jobs-- even if they could see that the plan was unsustainable. Now we're seeing how that unsustainability isn't just company to company, it's country to country.

Breaking up the air traffic controllers union ushered in an era of deregulation that pushed through the 1980s, into the 90s and that we're all suffering through and paying for as you read this. My dad still zips in and out of LAX happily and safely thank goodness, but I still feel like Reagan is threatening my family.