Professor Joseph McCartin, one of the nation’s leading scholars on the decline of the strike, has written the definitive account of the PATCO strike. In Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers and the Strike that Changed America, McCartin details two decades of struggle by this group of often militant Federal employees culminating in the failed 1981 strike. Collision Course is a well written, meticulously researched, and detailed account of the PATCO strike.

Predictable and bland, Charles Krauthammer claims that Democrats are trying to appease Labor. All I can say is that I wish that were the case!

In one of the local Kansas City area school districts, a proposed levy increase that would have put an end to three years of major budget cuts failed, and so the cuts continue even as enrollment rises. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, cuts are driven not so much by the economy but by union-busting politicians. Elsewhere in the US, teacher layoffs are being announced. ‘Tis the season . . .

And yet, despite all this, the teachers still teach.

I am so grateful for those who taught me, and even today I am still realizing just how much of a gift they gave me.

Once upon a time, a new Republican governor arrived in Madison, Wisconsin. The state was in debt, and their cash on hand was poor. The answer? For Robert La Follette in 1900, it was simple: raise taxes.

Fast forward about 100 years, and you get a very different answer from a very different Republican governor.

La Follette’s policies solved the budget crisis of his day and vastly improved the state and the lives of its citizen. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for Walker to learn that lesson and follow his example.

Here’s Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on “Meet the GOP” this morning.

Here’s the Quitter on Faux News yesterday, saying mean things about the company that employed her husband for 18 years.

Workers returned Tuesday to the job at Stella D’Oro Biscuit Co. in the Bronx after a judge ordered the company reinstate the 136 employees who had remained strong throughout a brutal 11-month strike. But before they could even walk through the doors, they were greeted with the anti-union response by the company’s private equity firm owners, the 21st century’s mutation of the robber barons: Brynwood Partners announced it would shut down operations in October.

Over at Washington Monthly, the editors asked a few Famous Names to describe the book they think President Obama should read. But they did not ask the rest of us.

So I’d like to submit a suggestion. In fact, I’ll go easy on the new president and offer up a report rather than an entire book.

Today, I’d like to introduce Marcy Rein, a retired member of OPEIU Local 29, who worked in the ILWU Organizing Department for most of the Blue Diamond campaign she describes below. The Blue Diamond workers’ years-long effort to gain a union recently ended with a loss, and Rein vividly describes how that experience demonstrates yet again why we need passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

For four years, the workers on the organizing committee at the Blue Diamond Growers (BDG) plant in Sacramento, Calif., had done everything they could to avoid being where they were on the night of Nov. 19.

We all know that when it comes to providing health care, maternity leave and retirement security for all their citizens, Britain, France and all the rest of “old” Europe make the United States look pretty pathetic.

For instance, Britain provides 72 weeks of paid maternity leave while even South Africa, at the low end of the spectrum, offers 12 paid weeks.