In Defense of Liberals

The excerpt below is from a local op-ed piece by Bob Conway in the South Bend Tribune(6/12/08):

I love that bumper sticker that reads: "Organized Labor--the folks who brought you the weekend." Too many of us take things like weekends off, vacations, the 40-hour work week, overtime, sick pay and the minimum wage for granted these days--forgetting that only a few generations ago virtually no American worker had them. The reason we have these benefits today is not that American corporations suddenly decided one day, all on their own, to be magnanimous. Workers have these things now because the liberal labor leaders of my parents' generation organized and fought beside American workers to wrest these now commonplace perks from the bitter, reluctant, stingy, avaricious hands of employers who treated wage workers like lower forms of life.