Hyperbole

Check out this story in LA Times.
(Free registration, blah blah... I'm sure you can find a similar story elsewhere about the grocery worker strike.)

I can remember hearing myself (as a younger man) saying something like, "earlier in this [20th] century we needed unions, but we don't need them any more." How naïve I was then – either to think that corporations today were more enlightened, or that legislation/regulation had become adequately protective of workers – both couldn't be farther from the truth.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think unions are a perfect institution. History bears out many cases of union corruption rivaling the corruption of the corporations they were trying to reign in. But without the unions, it is unlikely that these workers would ever have had any health care benefits to protest losing now.
This, of course, segues into all the reasons why I think the health care system in this country is broken – maybe I can digress there some other time...

At any rate, I don't know what is going to come out of this strike, but I support it, and intend to stay out of those stores until it's over. But with the rabid [sic] expansion of Wal-Mart and its hordes of uninsured and underinsured wokers, this trend may be irreversible. Again, I could go on and on about what is wrong with Wal-Mart – maybe some other time...

(Just to be clear, I mean no disrespect to the workers of Wal-Mart. Times are tough, and for many people WM is the only paycheck they can get. I'm sure many of these folks would rather not work for Wal-Mart, or would rather Wal-Mart respected them more, but are not in a position to dictate terms.)