I can't disagree with the idea of organizing service workers, but the idea that "there is no future scenario in which every job in America requires a college degree" is just not true. A hundred years ago, with the economy dominated by farming and by textile jobs that could be done by immigrants who spoke no English, it seemed as if there were always going to be jobs for people who were illiterate and good jobs for people who were literate but had no education beyond the 8th grade. Progress means jobs are going to require more training and more education; already the best-paying jobs involve multiple degrees and internships that only end around age 30, whereas medieval apprenticeships started at 10 and ended at 17.

Also, although the US has gotten less egalitarian and less unionized since the 1950s and 60s, the difference isn't very big compared to that between the US and the rest of the world. At its lowest, the US Gini index was 39; using today's methodology, it would be 41. This would be higher than in every developed country today except Singapore and Hong Kong. Israel, whose current Gini is 39, has so many ethnic and social rifts and so much poverty that even neo-liberal papers like Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post decry its inequality. Similarly, at its highest, the US union density was 23%, in 1970, lower than in most other developed Western countries today, including post-Thatcher Britain at 29%. The culture created by GM offered a lot of opportunity to the high school-educated urban white male, but not to the rest of the country, and that was reflected in the already unacceptably high national Gini index.

Your point about the role of race in maintaining inequality in the U.S. is well taken. That's a big reason why new organizing cannot just be a blast from the past -- we need to exceed the gains of the 1950s and 60s which too frequently raised the wages of white working men while excluding women and people of color from the most lucrative jobs or from membership entirely. The good news is that the labor movement has come a long way since then -- today, African American workers are *more* likely to belong to unions than whites (although Latinos are still less likely to be union members and the picture is mixed for Asian-Americans). There are still significant racial barriers to overcome -- especially in the construction unions, which I plan to address later this week -- but the image of unions today as continuing to serve an overwhelmingly white male membership is obsolete. Leadership (especially at the highest levels) is another question.

I stand by my point that "there is no future scenario in which every job in America requires a college degree." Reaching back a hundred years and more you point out that there were jobs for people who did not speak English, had no formal education, and were illiterate. The reality is that there are still people working at jobs in the U.S. today who do not speak English, have no formal education, and are illiterate. Certainly it's a smaller and more poorly paid sector of the economy -- that's the point I've made in my post. But people with that lack of skill are still going to work everyday, and I believe these jobs will also be around in another century, despite advances we will no doubt see in mechanization. The question is whether they will be jobs that offer a decent standard of living in exchange for often difficult labor.

Will GM's bankruptcy affect a site like this for truck and auto parts ?