God, every time I hear someone whelping about union jobs, I want to retch. Seriously. Unions have done more to destroy the competitive backbone of this country than nearly any other force.

GM went to wrack and ruin because of the unions (and, yes, completely inept management).[/quote]

That’s a historically new, revisionist, American and Anglo, corporate unproven theory in the campaign against organized labor. They’ve replaced the Pinkerton thugs of earlier America with lobbyists and subsidized lackey “think-tanks “.
Many EU countries have significant labor/union organizations,(reaching up to even white collar jobs), well above US levels.
Their economic performance even in this crisis, is much better than ours, and their societies are strikingly absent of an underclass, so persistent in the US.
Germany,not only the most productive economy of the world, but the biggest exporter, (yeah, bigger that Wal-China), has very high levels of union membership and influence in a cross section of its industries with wages matching and even surpassing US incomes.
As for GM, their “union” factories are more like sweatshops compared to German counterparts. Just visit BMW’s Munich and Mercedes Stuttgart union plants,… I have.