here are no more May Days. My daughter is grown and in college; we still laugh occasionally about the teacher protest in Gap. But she’s not a union person and probably never will be. Most one-room schoolhouses in France have been closed.

This brave new NAFTA-esque, GATT-arian world doesn’t seem like the proper place to write longingly about labour unions. But that’s why I’ve done it. Intellectual or not, I am my father’s son and my daughter’s father, still a believer in causes; as a misplaced, misbegotten union man, my causes are mostly lost.

I came upon my old what is my salary? sandwich-board in the attic recently. The romantic in me welled instantly, and I imagined a father–an Asian, a Latino, an Eastern European father, someone who wished for his son or daughter ‘good’ money, job security, a forty-hour week. I conjured up many such fathers. And millions of their children.