At factories like the General Motors complex in Flint, Michigan, work was tedious, physically demanding, and frequently dangerous. Injuries abounded as foremen sped up assembly lines in an effort to weed out weaker laborers. Workers were afraid to take breaks lest capricious supervisors give away their jobs. "If guys had to urinate or whatever, it went in their pants or on the floor," recalls Arthur Lowell, now 91, who started working in the Flint factory in 1936, when he was 18. "The boss could fire you if he didn't like your looks, so you were very careful about what you said."

The story was the same throughout the auto industry--and there wasn't much workers could do about it. They didn't have formal or legal channels for recourse. Collective action wasn't much of an option, either, since carmakers were under no legal obligation to bargain with unions and had few constraints on their anti-union activities. When workers went on strike, companies brought in permanent replacements; when workers staged occupations, companies hired spies and security forces to infiltrate labor efforts and, if necessary, take out protesters by force.

There are some powerful people who would genuinely like us to go back to those days. Remember Tom DeLay on the sweatshops of the Marianas Islands? ("You represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system.") But for the most part, I think Americans who bemoan unions are quite supportive of the changes they wrought in the system described above; rather, they're thinking about over-generous (though that's subjective) retirement benefits or small-bore work restrictions that are at least annoying if not downright obstructive to productive work.

For instance, I was an intern at NPR in Washington many years ago, a place that's a stickler for union rules. (Full disclosure: I am now a member of a broadcast union.) When we were out in the field, only the engineer was allowed to touch the equipment, which meant that setup and breakdown could only be done by one person and took significantly longer - after all, coiling cable and packing boxes is exactly what interns are supposed to be drafted into doing, right? And yet, such rules come from a place of genuine need for worker protection. If someone's hired to do a specific job, he can't live in the uncertainty that at any moment someone else might pick up some of his work for free, reducing his work hours and pay. Is my experience at NPR an example of a rule gone too far, a rule lacking enough nuance? Probably. But unfortunately, not many people charge unions with lacking nuance; they charge them with killing the American economy. And that tends to breed a sense of embattled defiance.

It would be great and productive if we could have a national conversation about unions that involved praising and valuing them for everything they've secured and continue to protect for American workers while examining what specific rules and policies and benefits might no longer be applicable or viable. Because I think most Americans who are casually anti-union wouldn't want the whole country's working conditions looking like the Marianas...but they probably don't realize that unions are fundamentally what stand between American workers and sweatshop conditions.

But unions always find themselves negotiating with Tom DeLay, or this month, Bob Corker, whose goal, unions know, is ultimately to destroy unions. Can we really blame the UAW for balking at some of their most stringent demands? (And can we not be deeply impressed at how much the UAW was willing to give up in those negotiations?)

Again, Cohn:

But, for all of Detroit's mistakes, it is also a victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for bluecollar workers. When the carmakers, pushed by unions, agreed to provide workers with a steady level of purchasing power, comprehensive health benefits lasting into retirement, and various forms of workplace rights, they were promising something that all Americans covet. And, while the financial costs and managerial constraints associated with that effort have helped bring domestic carmakers to the edge of collapse, ultimate responsibility for this situation lies beyond Detroit.
In a more enlightened society, after all, government would have made those promises and extended them to all workers, thereby spreading the burden of financing them to all taxpayers. That's how it's done in Europe and in Japan--which, not coincidentally, is the home of Detroit's most successful competitors. But the U.S. government never took that step. So, instead of a public welfare state, we got a private one, administered for only some workers and paid for by their employers. Sooner or later, this arrangement was bound to fail.

What's amazing and dispiriting to me is how many of the comments in response to Cohn's piece involved snarkily rejecting the idea that workers deserve anything in particular. Especially under the current "ownership society" paradigm of the last eight years, America has even more deeply ingrained the idea that worker benefits and protections are unnatural.

I don't agree with Cohn's ultimate conclusion that the U.S. should be like Scandinavia. For a whole host of reasons, among them the inherently individualistic American character that we probably can't escape even if we want to, we can never be Sweden (though I visited Sweden a couple years ago and loved it!). But I do think we can start understanding that national healthcare and strong worker protection and other liberal ideas go hand in hand with strong business and a booming economy. We can start undoing the false choice that conservatives have been forcing on us for decades: either you have rights and benefits, or you have good business, but you can't have both.