People think they miss manufacturing jobs. They don’t. They miss social benefits guaranteed by a union.

40 hour work week? Union won.
Worker’s comp insurance? Union won.
Overtime pay? Union won.

@jhankins This is absolutely true, but I do think people miss feeling like their labor is producing something useful to people like themselves, rather than being a complete and utter bullshit job making their boss even richer and making people like themselves deal with more and more bullshit in their everyday lives.
@dalias @jhankins Alienation hit factory work before it hit office work. Running a machine to indempolate widgets or compress two doohickeys together is repetitive to the point of incoherence, and you never feel like you made something meaningful you would recognise in your daily life.
@spacehobo @dalias @jhankins
100% true, but OTOH it now _has_ hit office work (certainly in my case), which (in theory) should help the "workers by hand or by brain" (as UK Labour's old clause IV had it) that they're all on the same side...