To put things in perspective for you, $200,000 a year is above-median in the richest parts of Manhattan, and about 97th percentile nationwide. That’s not middle class.

Rich or upper class people make millions or billions. CEOs, other executives, A list actors, major writers, those are the rich/upper class.

A person making six digits is by no means rich. I’d put $200,000 a year as middle class.

If you include $35,000 as middle class, even someone working overtime at McDonald’s is Middle Class.

The republican Manhattan Institute began 1981 – Ms. Gelinas writes in republican tabloids, her favorites Bill Oreilly, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh who love to harangue negatives with racial undertones they favor Baroness of Wasilla Sarah Palin {Henry Loeb} policies.

Long hours and no overtime, no grievance procedure, no paid vacation, no sick leave, injured on duty – you get fired, faulty equipment, no workmen compensation, rely on handouts and lord will hold your hand – Baroness of Wasilla and her choir what really irks them is minorities now get the protection of law – thus this ‘sound point’.

At any rate: unions were formed so that your father would be able to work 40 hours a week instead of 80, and retire at 65. In Hong Kong and Singapore, arguably the only two really capitalist countries in the world, neither is guaranteed. Singapore has a lush social security system, but it’s entirely defined-contribution, without any redistribution: if your benefits run out when you’re 70, you have to go back into the workforce. There are a lot of advantages to living in a capitalist country, rather than in a lobbyist-run country, but there are also disadvantages.

The question of what unions do now is different… but a lot of the privileges given to the most powerful unions stem from an unholy alliance made between the major unions and the major employers after WW2, in which the unions would give up on fighting for the entire working class and instead get benefits for just their own members. The more militant unions, e.g. the TWU before it joined the AFL, were opposed to this, but the employers believed that their ideas about social security and health care for all were socialistic.

Conversely, consider the difference between American cities and anywhere else in the developed world that’s not Hong Kong or Singapore. The US actually has fewer benefits than most countries. What unions get in the US is a lot by US standards, but not by the standards of Continental Europe and parts of East Asia.

The difference in costs come from how many people are employed and how efficiently they’re used, not from how much they’re compensated. For example, proof of payment means one operator per mainline train instead of six; OPTO means one operator per subway train instead of two; frequent off-peak service means more regular shifts and less overtime, reducing labor costs per train.

(I’m not sure why you think I said that $200,000 is middle class. It’s not, not even in Manhattan – I’d put the middle/upper-middle boundary at a little over $100,000 for Manhattan living costs. Outside Manhattan, even $75,000 could be called upper middle class.)