The Heritage Foundation wants you to have the right to work for minimum wage

But they're against the minimum wage, so what they're really about is your right to work for free! Yessiree Massa, bring back them good old days!

At least in the good old days your owner had some sort of obligation to provide his slaves with food and shelter. Those days are gone, my friend. We have salvaged  human dignity from the depravities of the slave owners. You're free, free at last! Free to try to feed your family and keep a roof over their heads on five bucks an hour. Less if you happen to be "undocumented".

Stepped into a particularly noxious shit-pile today; Right to work creates jobs and choice. Sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and based on some "research" by their labor economist, James Sherk, who never met a worker who wouldn't rather work for less if only he didn't have to pay those damned union dues.

My dear Daddy had a bad case of that attitude back in the day. Worked at a place called Omark, just around the corner from the General Electric plant. Every few years the lads at GE would have to strike for a few weeks, and then settle for a modest raise. Omark would then give their guys, who always made less, the same modest percentage of a raise. If the GE guys won 10% on their ten bucks an hour (we're going back quite a few years here)  Omark would give their guys 10% on their eight. Then the Omark guys would gloat: hey, we're actually ahead, we didn't lose three weeks pay going on strike!

Daddy eventually came round to the realization that the Omark guys wouldn't have got a red cent if the guys around the corner hadn't gone on strike, but it was impossible to explain it to him at the time.

I've worked in big shops and small, union and non-union, and I can say without a doubt you're better off with a union. Not that unions are perfect. In fact, the only place I ever actually got fired from was a union shop. Dresser Industries. Made oil-rigs and overhead cranes. Became part of Dick Cheney's Haliburton empire eventually.

But that's another story. The Heritage Foundation was kick-started by Joseph Coors way back in the day. While I now drink his light beer too often, I've never been a fan of his politics. And I especially don't like anti-worker politics. Yes, it's true that unions protect the halt and the lame and the drug-addled and the lazy. They also protect the worker whose only flaw is that her ass-kissing skills aren't up to company standards. They protect the gay worker and the racial minority. They protect the sick and the old. They raise the bar at the union plants so that the Omarks around the corner have to follow suit.

Look around you. It wasn't the unions who ripped the guts out of the manufacturing economy and sent millions of jobs to China and Mexico. It was the kind of people who support the Heritage Foundation.