In my job working for grocery workers, i sometimes hear that unions are a thing of the past. "We now have laws to take care of things like safety, and child labor," i am told.

An ABC News investigation reveals today that our child labor laws in particular haven't been so effective:

 ...an ABC News investigation found children, including one as young as five-years-old, working in its fields.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/young-children-working-blueberry-fields-walmart-severs-ties/story?id=8951044

Here's the news story that really caught my attention today. I think it may represent a significant departure for mainstream unions in the United States, which for 120 years have remained largely deferential to capital.

Steelworkers Form Collaboration with MONDRAGON, the World’s Largest Worker-Owned Cooperative

“Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants.  We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

http://www.usw.org/media_center/releases_advisories?id=0234

In the past century, hundreds of union members from another union, the Industrial Workers of the World, have died for the dream of worker ownership of factories, shops and mills. At least eight of them died in Colorado, in a 1927-28 strike:

In the early dawn light the miners scattered under a hail of lead. Twelve remained on the ground, some writhing in agony while others lay still. At least six died; more than sixty were injured.

http://www.rebelgraphics.org/serene.html

We're approaching the November anniversary of the Columbine Mine Massacre, which arrives just before Thanksgiving every year. Six were killed twelve miles north of Denver, and two more later in Walsenburg.