npr.org/…/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-…

It doesn’t change overnight. Union membership was the plug holding all the money in the barrel, holding back the pressure of the bosses just taking whatever they could squeeze, gradually in a coordinated bloc, but not enough that people would jump ship from their specific operation and go to another place, but enough that every year there would be less and less, until now a majority of Americans can’t pay their expenses.

Maybe it wasn’t unions. You might be right. There are all these graphs pointing to something specific that happened in the 1970s that suddenly divorced productivity gains from wage gains, so maybe whatever it was that caused that finally began to have its real awful influence in the mid-1990s and finally really bear fruit in the late 2000s. Kevin’s dad didn’t buy that house in 1991. You get what I’m saying. There’s a delay. But, like I say, I have no real idea. I’m just guessing and throwing out random possibilities. Something fucked everything up. Probably a combination of things. Not having unions definitely couldn’t have helped.