MMy father used to express his hopes for me while passing through the doorway between his small store in front and our apartment in the rear. He’d talk to my mother as though I wasn’t standing right there. ‘He’s artistic,’ he’d say. ‘He could become a sign-painter. People always need signs. Pays good money. Tough union to crack, though.’

Then, a week or so later: ‘Meat-cutter. People’re always going to eat meat, for heaven’s sake. Steady work, and he’ll make good money if he can get into the union.’

Later still: ‘I was talking to Hansen, the plumber. Tells me there’s lots of work around. He’d be willing to start him as a helper. If it works out, he’ll help him get a union card. Plumbing, it’s steady.’

These, and half a dozen other careers, were his great expectations for me. It was the early fifties; I was twelve or thirteen.

My father was a small, disappointed man who ran a foundering candy store in Brooklyn. He worked twelve to fourteen hours each day, seven days a week, barely keeping his family above the low tide of subsistence. Naturally, he wanted a better life for me: to him, that meant job security, ‘good’ money and a forty-hour week. In other words, a union job. In our neighbourhood, an entire generation of hard-working fathers wanted the same thing for their sons.

became an English professor, and by the late 1970s was teaching at a small liberal arts college. One year my colleagues and I became unhappy with our salary and conditions, and I found myself on a committee organized to address the problems. The committee’s first task was to draft a statement defining a professor’s function–words like ‘educator’, ‘facilitator’ and ‘pedagogue’ were debated for hours. When I suggested that since we performed tasks for a salary, we really ought to consider ourselves ‘workers’. It was as though I’d farted.

The group that was finally formed to represent the professors called itself an ‘Association’. Because it refused to call itself a union, it could never really be a union. Such snobbery also drove away the non-teaching college staff–secretaries and plant workers mostly–who joined a Teamsters’ local.

My heart was never really in my ‘Association’, even though I was required to pay dues and have it represent me. And then one year, 1976, the Association agreed to work without a contract. I argued at one meeting that a strike, or at least the threat of one, was the only leverage an organized workforce had. (My father would have been proud of me.) I was outvoted and told that I didn’t understand the subtleties of negotiations in academia.

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.