“If they want to strike, they should be fired.”

Call out the Pinkerton guards! The new governor John Kasich of Ohio on public employees, sounding like an incredulous early 20 century steel baron: "If they want to strike, they should be fired,” Mr. Kasich said in a speech. “They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for?”

Saw this disheartening (to me) item in the New York Times this morning: Strained States Turning to Laws to Curb Labor Unions. Later found myself talking to a coworker about the difficulties of interpreting the history of organized labor. The incredible decline in union representation over the last half-century and an apparently increasing, politicized (although not historically unprecedented) suspicion of organized labor can make both radical and mainstream labor movements of the past 100 years seem too irrelevant, controversial, anomalous, or difficult to fully integrate into many museums' narratives of American industry.

As the modern structure of work and industry undergoes immense global shifts, maybe the history of organized labor's struggles, values, failures, and achievements is more important than ever. What does the past look like, and why is the present different? A couple organizations that are keeping real conversations alive about the past, present, and future of organized labor in the US:

Tamiment Labor Library at New York University
Labor Heritage Foundation
1912 Lawrence Textile Strike Centennial

Oh, and one more low point from the article -- the new governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker: "We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots."

That's a ridiculously misleading dichotomy. Divide and conquer. The idea that public employees are the "haves" of our corporate society is, in my estimation, ludicrous.