I always shake my head when I read that the country no longer has industry and has evolved into a "service economy". That simple isn’t true. The main problem is that we have jobs–whether industrial or service–that don’t pay decently and are largely non-union.

    Someone thinks we should do something about that:

The United Auto Workers union said it is prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a bid to organize employees, including a new push for hourly factory workers at foreign-owned car plants in the U.S.

 The effort is part of a major shift in focus by the UAW, which had spent most of the past 75 years extracting better wages and benefits from the three Detroit auto makers.

 Now, after two of the Big Three were forced into bankruptcy, in part because of uncompetitive labor contracts, the union’s new president intends to make a major push this year to organize workers at U.S. plants owned by makers such as Toyota Motor Corp., Volkswagen AG and Hyundai Motor Co.

   The UAW effort really is something that every union should support and mimic–the union is willing to risk a big chunk of change to organize new members. Bravo! It’s not going to be easy–but fighting is better than dying.

   It won’t be easy, in part, because the traditional press is so, so dumb. Just take the above comment that the Big Three got into financial trouble "in part because of uncompetitive labor contracts". Actually, the sentence should have said, "mainly because of health care costs because the country is unwilling to enact a national, ‘Medicare for All" system that would have relieved the auto industry–and all of business–from the crushing costs of health care".