An Ode to the Labor Movement

What else does a man do besides keep house .. .and hang around the saloon, after he has been out of work for fourteen months?” Harvey Swados asked in these pages in 1961, in his essay “The Miners: Men Without Work.”

Now, Tom Geoghegan, in a creative ode to the American labor movement, asks the same question about Midwestern auto and steel workers—the men and women who have suffered the costs of economic mismanagement, imports and leveraged buyouts.