I’m not a well-traveled person. I secured a reputation of sorts in grad school, on the first day of Elaine Bernard’s global labor movements class. As we went around the room for introductions, and everyone explained who they were and where they came from (yes, yes, they were the union, the mighty, might union) and discussed their various international contacts and trips abroad, I introduced myself with a flip “Shaun Richman, AFT, Queens, NY. Frankly, I’m uncomfortable leaving Queens.” I’ve spent my entire life - nearly 30 years of it - in this fine borough, but all things have an end. I finally received an acceptable offer on my apartment. I signed the contract of sale on Friday and will be gone by November.

I’m looking to move to Brooklyn, someplace close to the Belt Parkway and the Verrazano Bridge, and within an hour of midtown by subway. Someplace quiet, pretty, affordable and in close proximity to fun. I’m not sure such a neighborhood exists. It’s the “affordable” part that’s difficult. I managed, in the end, to sell my apartment for nearly twice what I paid for it five years ago. Unfortunately, everything else went up in cost at least as much. Obvious choices like Park Slope and Fort Greene are prohibitively expensive.

I had high hopes for Sunset Park, with its ubiquitous park and skyline views. It is affordable - barely - but sleepy and undeveloped. Bay Ridge, slightly to the south, had much more appealing shopping and dining, but it’s so far from everything, I’m afraid no one would ever visit me and the neighborhood would serve as little more than a bedroom community for my Jersey commute.

Yesterday I got my hopes up about the unfortunately-named Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, but I dashed them today by visiting there. Even the nabe’s enthusiastic booster blog has trouble highlighting more than nice architecture and convenient geography:

“PLG is among the last of the neighborhoods that border Prospect Park where average working people can still (almost) afford to live… That lower price tag, however, comes with concessions - there are none of the higher-end boutiques, bars and restaurants that populate Park Slope, Prospect Heights and Brooklyn Heights.”

It was lovely, but I had a hard time locating a supermarket, a fruit stand or even a decent slice of pizza. You could call places like Prospect-Lefferts Gardens and Sunset Park “up and coming” neighborhoods, but only a fool counts on a neighborhood turnaround in troubled economic times like these. Perhaps I’m asking for too much. Perhaps simply being able to afford a roof over one’s head is the best one can hope for these days in New York. I’ve got three months until I’m out on my ass. Expectations decline on a daily basis.

We socialists, I hope, are not the types to revel in I-told-you-so’s, but for years we’ve been sounding the alarm that the consumer purchasing power of our fellow patriotic Americans could not be counted on to fuel the global economy. Wages for working Americans have been essentially stagnant since the 1970’s, leaving a huge amount of consumer debt to preserve the American Way of Life. But, we warned, one day we will all have to pay the piper.

That day seems to be at hand, with a mortgage crisis and bank failures making headlines. Gee whiz, the New York Times is finally giving this story the attention that it deserves in an otherwise-excellent series of articles “about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.” One article, which readers will likely use as a yardstick for their own financial worries, profiles a Ms. Diane McLeod who amassed over $280,000 in debt through credit cards, the home shopping network and two mortgages:

Ms. McLeod, who is 47, readily admits her money problems are largely of her own making. But as surely as it takes two to tango, she had partners in her financial demise. In recent years, those partners, including the financial giants Citigroup, Capital One and GE Capital, were collecting interest payments totaling more than 40 percent of her pretax income and thousands more in fees.

The temptations are surely hard to resist. As soon as I entered college, I received unsolicited credit card applications on a weekly basis. As soon as my first mortgage bill came due, I received my first offer to refinance the loan. But my parents’ own problems with debt when I was a kid served as a cautionary example for me, and I’ve always chafed at the idea of owing anyone or anything. For the most part, I have what economists would call “good debt.” About twenty thousand dollars in student loans, still in an in-school deferment. A single home mortgage with tiny monthly payments of under $400. I own multiple credit cards, but, save for a period of unemployment a few years back, I’ve never carried a balance (and, ironically, the time that I did rack up - ultimately pay off - credit card debt probably improved my credit rating). I have a small auto loan that I’m rapidly paying off by trebling the minimum monthly payments. And I’ve even got a modest savings savings account!

So, all in all, I’m doing okay. Except that the credit crunch and general economic uncertainty is effecting all of us by making everything so damn uncertain. For example, I’ve been trying to sell my apartment since last September to no avail. But the only official bid I got was an insulting low-ball offer from some 23-year-old kid with such bad credit that it would be a miracle if he got a mortgage. As a board member of my co-op, one of the last buyers that I recall approving was a unionized Long Island schoolteacher earning an impressive six-figure salary, who, nevertheless, had amassed a significant amount of consumer debt that he was diligently paying down. His credit score wasn’t very good, but he obviously earned enough money to swing the mortgage and maintenance payments and still afford annual south american vacations. So we approved him as a shareholder, on the cusp of the mortgage crisis.

I’m fairly certain that if this teacher applied for a mortgage today, he would be rejected. So, if people like that can’t get clearance to buy their own homes, who can be counted on to buy us out of our grossly inflated mortgages? No wonder this entire country feels like it’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Finally getting their due after a generation and a half of younger bands cashed in on their legacy, the Replacements are in the midst of the rock-n-roll equivalent of a Presidential exploratory committee for a reunion tour. First came Jim Walsh’s adoring biography, and now the Mats’ early funny records get the deluxe treatment from Rhino records, re-mastered and fleshed out with bonus tracks.

The Replacements’ later years on a major label were marked by disappointment, as each effort to turn their next record into a “Great Rock Statement” missed the mark, making the out-takes and B-sides an essential part of the band’s narrative. Their indie years, on the other hand, were marked by a constant maturation and growth that culminated in as perfect a record as any band has ever committed to modified petroleum product, 1984’s “Let It Be.” Consequently, the bonus tracks are the usual mix of covers (”20th Century Boy”), demos (a more vulnerable sounding “Sixteen Blue” and a Westerberg solo “Answering Machine”) and excised tracks (”Temptation Eyes” and “Perfectly Lethal”) that add little to the record but a historical footnote and the slight satisfaction that there are better sounding versions of these songs than our muddy, 16th generation traded bootlegs.

It was on “Let It Be” that the band finally acquiesced and let lead singer Paul Westerberg load up the disc with four of the most beautiful fucked up ballads. On earlier records, these songs wound up as B-sides or home demos that were never fully realized. Now they are rightfully reclaim the spotlight, starting with “If Only You Were Lonely,” the cutesy, clumsy love-song left off of the band’s trash debut, “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash,” but featured on 76.5% of all mixtapes made ever since. “If Only You Were Lonely” hinted at a wit and maturity that songs like “I Hate Music” and “Shutup” belied, but guitarist Bob Stinson hated it, and it was relegated to B-side status. The remainder of the bonus tracks on “Sorry Ma” indicate that “I Hate Music” was as witty as all four band members were willing to get on their first record.

“If You Get Married” was probably the next great ballad that the Replacements might have recorded, an elegiac ode to swinging bachelorhood and the dread of growing up, except that Westerberg never had the nerve to propose its inclusion on a record. Heretofore, its only known existence was a low-quality recording of a slightly inebriated live performance. On the newly-remastered “Stink,” “Married” turns up as a fully realized home demo — a lost classic. The rest of the short record is fleshed out with Hank Williams and Bill Haley covers, which, as far as I can tell have never gotten out of the vaults until now. It’s enough to make a fan misty to hear the Replacements wail on some classic in the studio at the height of their prowess, and for that reason and “If You Get Married,” “Stink” is the best value of the Replacements’ re-mastered discs.

“Hootenany” is a hoot. At the time of its release, it was the most stylistically diverse of the Replacements’ records. The bonus tracks continue in that freewheeling style. Two of those extra tracks are alternate versions of “Lovelines,” a first reading of the back pages of the Twin Cities’ favorite weekly alternative newspaper and a rambling rocker that steals the melody for the band’s smart ass entry into a Miller college band contest (”Keep your riches, give me a Budweiser,” our favorite weisenheimers shout). The highlight here, as on other records, is a Westerberg solo home demo, “Bad Worker,” in which our hero takes himself to task for being an otherly-motivated employee and a disappointment to his father.

A band as bootlegged as this is likely to leave a few key tracks off, but that seems an intentional tease for the boxed set that could follow (and the reunion tour to support it).

Ever since “Satellite Rides” failed to make them stars and lead singer Rhett Miller cut loose for a middling solo career, the Old 97s have reunited every four years to record a mellow studio album. Their latest, “Blame It On Gravity,” seems slight and easily dismissible, but so did their last long-player, “Drag It Up,” which turned out to be a real sleeper and is probably the Old 97s record that I listen to the most.

As can be expected from a band with multiple songwriters and a moonlighting lead singer, the sidemen deliver some of the best material here. In particular, bassist Murray Hammond, always one to take a star turn here and there, turns in a pair of crooning country ballads (Pick Hit: “The Color of a Lonely Heart Is Blue”) that serve to remind that the 97’s started out as the band that just might save country music. Otherwise, Miller steers the band towards power pop and VH1-style rock.

Rhett Miller remains a clever songwriter with a gift for wordplay and indelible characters, like the kid who “came from Pheonix in a borrowed VW Bug just to prove that he was on her like she was a drug” (“The Fool”) or the lothario who preys on “girls like you with your flip flop smiles and your big blue eyes on vacation” (“Dance With Me”). Most of these songs, particularly the slow burn of “The Easy Way” and the driving “Ride,” merely hint at the incredible power of this band live. Whatever else are “Blame it On Gravity’s” merits, at least it will put the Old 97s back on tour.

One of the greatest revelations of the year for me was seeing Bill Fletcher Jr. speak at New York’s Left Forum this past March. For years I’ve been familiar with Fletcher, who is, perhaps, the most prominent left intellectual in the U.S. labor movement, who was a special assistant to John Sweeney in the early years of this administration and still a trusted figure in the mainstream labor movement despite his socialist barnstorming. But this was the first time I had heard him speak. I was so captivated by the way he could crystalize and articulate the challenges we face and the practical and realistic steps we could take to address them that I attended every panel at which he spoke, which I hadn’t intended when I got there.

Fletcher has just published his first book, “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice,” co-written with Fernando Gapasin. Centered on the recent split between the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win group, the book features quite a bit of inside baseball reportage on the machinations leading up to the split. Fletcher is highly critical of the “undebate” that took place and focused on marginal and highly technical matters of per capita rebates and core jurisdictions, avoiding a larger reexamination of the role of our labor unions within a wider labor movement. Although Fletcher identifies some key differences in ideology and vision within the union movement, these were not addressed and anyway tend to cut across international union lines. Instead, both the AFL-CIO and what emerged as the Change to Win group, he charges, fundamentally share the same neo-Gompersian framework of “pure and simple” trade union roles and functions that the reason for the split was unnecessary.

One of Fletcher’s most cogent points in this book is that leftists who work in the trade union movement in relatively large numbers have, absent an organized Left, ideologized the mere act of organizing workers into unions, as though this is an inherently radical act. This point hit home for me as I have recently risen to a position of responsibility in my union without any organizational affiliations beyond my union membership and have made organizing workers the most important thing in my life. Indeed, William Z. Foster has become a hero of mine, in his 1919 incarnation for his sincere belief that organizing mass production workers into the conservative craft unions would necessarily radicalize them and their unions. Of course, Fletcher points out, the real point of organizing workers is to empower them to challenge their employers and improve their jobs and communities, not merely to collect their dues and “represent” them.

The last section of Fletcher and Gapasin’s book is devoted to their modest proposal to transform our trade union movement into a social justice movement that represents all workers, regardless of nation or employment status, and which challenges white supremacy, male patriarchy, U.S. imperialism and the entire global capitalist system. Good luck with that, Bill. In all seriousness, some of Fletcher and Gapasin’s proposals could gain traction among labor movement decision makers, as, for example, their proposal to transform our central labor councils (currently, the umbrella organizations of local unions in a city that gets together for political endorsements and campaigning and occasional strike support) into central workers councils embracing labor organizations beyond “pure and simple unions” and begin functioning like real community coalitions.

However, for the most part, Fletcher and Gasparin’s program is one that needs, as they call for in the proposal itself, an organized Left movement to carry out. At March’s Left Forum, Fletcher made a seemingly oft-hand reference to the need for a real socialist party that inspired very loud and spontaneous applause. During the Q&A, I waited very patiently (and, it turned out, futilely) to be called on and ask: “Bill, I’m with you on the need for a socialist party, and given the applause we heard, I’m not alone. Obviously such a project would not be an easy thing, given our legitimate political differences and the tendency towards factionalism and sectarianism. Still, any process that will move us towards a real organized Left will need leaders such as yourself out front, sponsoring the early calls and meetings. So, in your ample spare time, can you move on this?”

SEIU’s been facing an increasing amount of scrutiny from the press and from the left lately for its unconventional approach to bargaining to organize. This has been prompted in large part by the California Nurses Association’s controversial decision to intervene in a carefully negotiated and long-planned “neutrality” organizing campaign by SEIU in Ohio, and SEIU’s shockingly violent response at the 2008 Labor Notes conference. In the midst of this controversy, the Wall Street Journal reports details of some of these “secret organizing deals.” The website requires subscription, so I’ve posted relevant quotes below:

Two of the nation’s largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize.

The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers’ rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership “that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements.” That includes not disclosing them to union members.

[snip]

The agreements reached with Sodexho and Compass in 2005 give the companies “the right to designate the sites” where unions may try to organize workers, according to a confidential summary of the agreements reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The companies wouldn’t comment on how locations were selected for organizing.

The agreements, which expire at then end of 2008, stipulate the number of employees that the unions can try to organize: 11,000 Sodexho workers and 20,000 Compass workers.

The unions gave up the right to strike and to post derogatory language about the companies on bulletin boards. With Compass, the unions agreed to these restrictions “anywhere in the world.” In exchange, the companies agree not to oppose union organizing at the designated locations.

But limits are also set. “Local unions are not free to engage in organizing activities at any Compass or Sodexho locations unless the sites have been designated,” says the confidential summary.

Mr. Stern said that if workers wanted to join a union at a location the companies had ruled out, having these agreements would enable a union to negotiate on the matter. “If workers want a union we can discuss that,” he said. “Trust me, a lot more workers are coming in than being excluded by the agreement.”

[snip]

The agreements enable the unions to organize workers through a simple card-signing process in which the companies agree to remain neutral, rather than a secret-ballot election. The companies agree to provide the unions with lists of employees and access to workers. The unions give up the ability to strike and agree that they will present issues before a labor-management committee before engaging in leafleting or rallies.

These organizing deals need to be put into the context of the bloody war most employers will fight against a unionization drive, that results, for instance, one in five union activists being fired for union activity. There’s lots of material on the web about how nasty the fight can get and how few true protections workers have these days, so I assume anybody reading my website is familiar with this.

One of the main reasons that employers fight organizing drives so viciously is that with unionization of private sector firms hovering around eight percent, a union contract really can affect a firm’s competitiveness. As traditional organizing tactics have failed to bring employers to the table, unions have relied increasingly on huge (and hugely embarrassing) P.R. and community campaigns to force employers to recognize a union and agree to a contract. Smart employers have begun to take themselves out of the fight by signing the kinds of deals profiled in the WSJ piece. I don’t have any theoretical opposition to these kinds of agreements, and for the most part I think it’s a smart way for union’s to marshall their resources against the truly intransigent employers and to increase density for future bargaining.

The problem that I do have with SEIU’s application of this strategy is that the future always gets further and further away. As noted in the article, the “no strike / no disparagement / no organize” clauses of these agreements have expiration dates. As long as they are relatively brief, workers aren’t really losing much. A bottom up organizing campaign at any worksite with more than 1000 employees can often take two years or more anyhow. If the workers are impatient, the union can potentially re-negotiate the neutrality deal to incorporate a hot shop. Failing that, the workers are free to organize with a different union (although, without neutrality, good luck to them).

Without the ability to strike, unions are only able to win modest wage and benefits improvements and very little in terms of the “work rules” that make the biggest impact on the quality of one’s working life. As long as we’re talking about a two or three year period that allows the union to get its foot in the door at one employer while fighting to drag his main competitors to the table in order to bargain for greater gains at all of the employers in the next contract cycle, what’s the problem? The problem comes from these agreements being stretched out for longer and longer - seven or eight years in some cases - while the union fetishizes “density” at the expense of meaningful contractual gains for the new members it has organized. SEIU, I’m sure, is not unaware of this conflict. In my brief stint as an SEIU organizer three years ago, I worked on a home care organizing campaign that went down in flames. Part of the reason was that some of the employees, who make so little that they work for two or three agencies at the same time - already were SEIU members at their other jobs. They voted as a bloc against the union, in part because they hasn’t felt that being in the union had made an impressionable difference in their lives.

This problem is compounded by SEIU’s reorganization of smaller locals into giant “megalocals.” SEIU is ostensibly aping the structure of the giant corporations it goes up against to better marshall resources against them. Obviously, however, this means a significant curtailing of local union democracy and naturally serves to minimize voices of dissent. Andy Stern and Dennis Rivera, who both had to run insurgent campaigns in order to “take back” their unions, should be more sensitive to this problem. Speaking cynically, perhaps they are all too sensitive to it. Andy Stern aside, neutrality deals such as these should not be dismissed out of hand by trade union activists. They are a good idea, but anyone negotiating such deals necessarily walks a fine line between density and democracy.

Teachers at ten New York City schools went on strike Friday over the high cost of health care, but their union was not sued, their president not imprisoned and their members not fined two days of pay for every day out on the picket line. What gives?

The teachers in question work at Catholic schools in the archdiocese of New York so their union is not subject to the same draconian law that would apply to the city’s public school teachers. Is their strike not a “disruption” in the lives of the parents who enroll their children there? Do Catholic school-kids not rely on the structure and safety of the classroom as much as public school kids? Of course not. The simple truth is that while Catholic school teachers might arguably have to answer to a higher law, only public school teachers have to report to a Boss that makes the law and has the power of the state to enforce it. Hell hath no fury like Mayor Bloomberg and the Taylor law. It’s one more strike against monarchistic thinking.

In the rock-n-roll hype that followed “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the UK had a brief “scene” that failed to take off. Dubbed the “new wave of the new wave,” it was compared to the summer of 1977 (although, doesn’t the N.M.E. compare everything to the Sex Pistols?) and lasted even shorter. The most prominent of the groups, S*M*A*S*H*, failed to make an impact when their only long player, “Self Abused,” landed on these shores. It can’t quite be called a cut out classic, because there probably weren’t copies pressed to put ‘em in the clearance bins. This was a pretty hard record to find in 1994, and I’m lucky to still have my copy.

S*M*A*S*H* was a tight power trio, with a hard rock sound, a heavy bottom and lots of great hooks, and oddly fascinating lyrics that leave you genuinely unsure if front-man E. Borrie was a dope of a genius.

The record certainly starts off compellingly, on “Revisited No. 5,” a bombastic heavy metal lament:

Back to where my friend died
Not to the scene of his ugly suicide
but to where he used to live
Just to have him back, anything I would give

This theme of personal tragedy is hinted at on several of the album’s tracks, including the poppy single, “Real Surreal,” whose chorus includes the line “I’m not sad and you’re not dead.” The mixing of anger, sadness and euphoria suggest a real writing talent, but other songs give pause. “Oh Ovary” and “Time” come across like clunky attempts at, like, way deep political philosophizing. Or they could be satirizing the glib liberalism of many rock stars. That Borrie has a sense of humor is confirmed by the oh-so-serious spoken-word bridge on the title track:

I open my mouth and like Chinese whispers
Michael Jackson’s going out with my kid sister
but I’m an only child
You believe what I’ve said?
You’ve been mislead!

Combine the profane with the profound and the pretend, add in references to David Attenborough, the Brontes and Barabas and you have an almost Dylanesque mix. Perhaps Borrie’s most telling line is “Bob Dylan sucks my dick or am I sick?” Partly, it’s a punk rock “kill your idols” statement (and fairly traditional, at that, for its selection of a 1960’s icon). But more than that, it’s a bid to be taken seriously even when acting the fool. It’s a wink to the audience, I like to think, to let you know that this band is as smart as you want them to be. It’s a pity that they so completely dropped off the face of the planet.

Born under a lame duck, for most of my living memory we’ve had only two governors in New York. Twelve years of Democrat Mario Cuomo and twelve years of Republican George Pataki. Now, in the blink of an eye, we just burned through another one. I’m not shedding any tears for Client 9, but I am somewhat dumbfounded that he was felled so quickly by something so…trivial.

At Monday’s Labor Research Association awards dinner, NYS Labor Commissioner Patricia Smith stood in for the governor-in-hiding and delivered a pretty convincing defense of his administration’s record. Hundreds of times more wage and hours claims against deadbeat employers than the previous administration. Hundreds of times more health and safety cases investigated than the previous administration. And, yes, he gave over 50,000 early childhood educators the right to organize into unions. Excepting that last one, what is really exceptional about that record? Have politics degenerated in such a way that we consider merely enforcing the law to be noteworthy and commendable?

To my mind, Elliot Spitzer was never a reliable friend of labor and David Paterson will be a welcome replacement (at last, a governor who needs us!). As good as Elliot “Ness” Spitzer’s record was as Attorney-General, after three terms of Republican misrule, voters would have voted in droves for a department store mannequin. Spitzer, like Illinois’ Rod Blagojevich and Massachusetts’ Deval Patrick, translated his lucky landslide as some kind of mandate and declared war on everyone, including his own party and unions like NYSUT when it suited his purpose. Is it any wonder that his opponents in Albany pounced on him the first time he showed an exploitable weakness?

And, boy, is this a story that can be exploited! Already, the two days it took Spitzer to decide to resign gave us time to ponder lots of questions. Questions like, what’s worse: to be Client 8 or Client 10? Why did he choose to book a hotel room under a campaign donor’s name? Because George Fox sounded cool? Well, that’s the last time that guy makes a donation to your campaign fund, Nine. Note to Elliot: next time you’re looking for an alias, do what the rest of us do - read a Dashiell Hammett story and pick the coolest name (”Yes, I’d like to reserve a room. Name: Harry Brazil”). And, finally, what kind of things does Spitzer ask a girl to do that she “might not think were safe?” I’m imagining a well-lubed baseball bat up the backside.

The simplest lesson that any of us can draw from this is that it is high time that we legalize prostitution. The illegality of sex work is the thin veneer of credibility that let the Republicans threaten impeachment and push Spitzer out the door. Applying health code standards and regulation to sex work would doubtlessly improve public health, and, hell, at a thousand dollars an hour, taxing that shit would help keep the Social Security fund solvent for generations to come (or should that be “generations to cum?”). Play safe, comrades. You’re benched, client #9. Batter up, governor #5.

Writing in the Sunday Times, Megan Hustad laments the cultural decline of “the office phone call.” People prefer to use e-mail for petty confrontations and negotiations, and valuable diplomatic skills are lost and new employees lose the informal training that comes with eavesdropping on the boss. In my new fancy-pants position with my union, I’ve noticed that my phone calls to people at headquarters frequently go to voicemail, and that the responses come back via Blackberry.

This seems to be a weekend for hand-wringing and tut-tutting over the technological devolution of our social interactions. Elsewhere in the Times, Laura Holson notices that these kids today sure do like to send text messages, creating some kind of generation gap. Apparently. Meanwhile on livejournal (itself, a weird barrier to normal social interaction) a friend of mine protests the suddenly rigid tradition of getting into and out of relationships on Myspace, complete with the formal change of relationship status from “Single” to “In a Relationship” (or vice versa), a reshuffle of one’s “top friends” and gooey comments added or deleted from each other’s profiles. Funnily enough, another friend popped back up on Myspace this weekend after deleting her account some weeks ago. Her relationship status, I took note because this is the reason that we are on the Myspace to begin with, had changed to “Single.” Is this now a way of responding to a break-up? New hairdo, new city, new Myspace profile?

I’ve been listening to old Replacements records this weekend, after reading Jim Walsh’s spotty but genuinely exuberant book about the 80’s indie icons. Paul Westerberg has always been a preternaturally grumpy old man (one of the reasons I’ve always liked him) and he’s been complaining about the distance that technology puts between us since tape-recorded answering machine messages. On a beautiful, daring and angry love song that closes out a record full of them (1984’s “Let it Be”), Westerberg, accompanied only by his electric guitar, complains “How do you say I’m lonely to an answering machine?” The song ends with the flat declaration, “I HATE your answering machine,” and a fade-out refrain of “313, 212.” Those two numbers used to signify Detroit and New York City, but soon they won’t mean much of anything as “area” codes are allowed to roam the country along with the person who totes them around in a cellphone - another kind of virtual identity.

It’s a safe bet that Westerberg, if he’s paying attention, finds flirting on a Facebook wall or announcing a divorce via text message to be even more ridiculous than “I’m not here right now…” Still, it’s hard to imagine any songwriter finding pathos in being dropped from someone’s “top friends,” or sending a come-on that can’t help but read like a booty call via text message. I h8 ur txt msg? No thanks.

It seems I chose a bizarre time to rediscover “V,” my favorite TV show from childhood about an alien invasion of Earth that served as a Holocaust parable. In a Penn Station book store on Friday, I noticed that familiar spray-painted “V” on the cover of a book called “V: The Second Generation.” Date of first publication: February 2008. The salesman who rang me up was as surprised as me to see it. “This used to be a TV show, didn’t it?”

The book is written by Kenneth Johnson, who created the initial 1983 miniseries but left before NBC made a mockery out of its sequels. Johnson writes the book as a straight up sequel to the original miniseries, taking place 25 years after the events in the original. In Johnson’s timeline, the Visitors have made good on their promise of sharing their scientific advances with mankind. Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s and numerous other diseases have been cured, new fuel and information technology introduced. All national wars have been put to an end. The Visitors brought order and control to the world, and, naturally, most people go along while those who closely collaborate are greatly rewarded. The tiny Resistance that does exist is branded as “terrorists” and “scientific plotters” by the Visitor-controlled media. The Visitors have captured millions of humans for food and slavery and convinced most people that they were killed by “Resistance terrorists,” and they’ve taken half of the Earth’s water under the ridiculous guise of “cleaning” it before its promised return to Earth.

In marked contrast to the “Starchild” of NBC’s sequels, the half-breed hybrids are rejected by both species as deformed “dregs,” relegated to the lowliest manual labor. The human scientists are doctors are rounded up into ghettoes and strictly controlled. The historic parallels are obvious, but Johnson has a frustrating tendency to make them explicit, as his narration goes off into tangents about the Vichy French, the Warsaw Ghetto, Captain Cook and the native Hawaiians, African slaveships and more, assuming a certain lack of historical knowledge in his readers. Of course, I think his primary audience is television executives that might option the book for a new “V” television series. One historical parallel that Johnson thankfully does not footnote is a call to war by the Visitor Leader in which she declares that the far-away mutual enemy of the Visitors and humans have created a dangerous new chemical weapon that they intend to use against us, and that preemptive action is necessary.

Towards the end of the original miniseries, the nascent Resistance launched an SOS message into space, which was a potentially interesting plot thread that the NBC sequels dropped. Is the enemy of my enemy truly my friend? What if another alien race comes, not to save Earth but to vie with the Visitors for control over it? Johnson picks this plotline back up, but leaves it unresolved. Just like NBC’s sequel, which was followed by a regular series after Earth’s liberation, Johnson is hedging his bets in order to keep a franchise going, this time with more brains.

How well does childhood memory of favorite teevee shows hold up? Judging by the maddening 80’s nostalgia currently in vogue, I would wager not well. I mean, “He Man” and “Jem” were pretty stupid as far as kids shows go. They’re simply painful to sit through as an adult. As a kid, my favorite “adult” show was “V,” an occasional miniseries turned shortly-lived regular series about the human resistance against an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth. What my five-year-old self enjoyed about the show was the rough-and-tumble adventuring antics of the resistance fighters, the “vshboo, vshboo” sound of the aliens’ laser guns and the frequent reveal that under the aliens’ human masks were lizard skins. An exciting action-adventure serial with no redeeming qualities, or so I recalled.

Revisiting the series on DVD, I was surprised to find that the original 1983 miniseries was a taut, sophisticated Nazi allegory. In a montage that was ripped off by “Independence Day” years later, 50 alien saucers appear over the major cities of the world, and people gather excitedly around their televisions and below the motherships to await first contact. Unlike the aliens of “Independence Day,” these “Visitors” have a more ambitious agenda that simply blowing stuff up. Their envoys send greetings of peace in a ceremony on the roof of the United Nations. Their planet is dying, they claim, and Earth has certain chemical resources that they need to save their planet. The Visitors have assumed human first names like “John” and “Diana,” and seem just like us except that they wear dark visors to protect their eyes from our sun, have weirdly modulated gravelly voices and dress in militaristic jumpsuits adorned by a symbol that looks like a connect-the-dots swastika, if you were being cynical. But why be cynical? The Visitors promise to share their vast scientific knowledge with us in exchange for our help. Intergalactic travel, a cure for cancer and more!

And many people fall all over themselves in the series’ first hour to collaborate with the Visitors: The journalist who trades her objectivity for exclusive access as their official mouthpiece, the industrialist who contracts her factory to engineer the Visitors’ mysterious chemical and the teenage loser who seeks power, respect and a laser gun in the Visitors youth auxiliary. At the same time, others begin to question the Visitors’ true motivation. But after an outlandish plot by Earth’s scientists to murder and drive away the Visitors is foiled and some of the brightest scientists in the world “confess” not only to the plot but to withholding cures for common diseases from the public, the handful of remaining skeptics are driven underground, hated by the vast public who welcome the protection of the Visitors’ clampdown, even as entire towns are “disappeared.”

Our skeptics, who slowly form a “Resistance” against the fascist aliens, eventually discover that the Visitors are actually giant lizards under their fake human skin, and that the chemical they are creating on Earth is flushed down the drain as soon as it’s brought on board the motherships. The captured humans, however, are stored in gooey pods to be brought back to the Visitors’ home planet. Some will be brainwashed and used as laser cannon fodder in the Visitor Leader’s many wars with his enemies. The rest, in classic science fiction tradition, will be eaten.

The first “V” miniseries was a big deal back in its day, with fairly sophisticated special effects and a very large cast. The storyline rapidly progresses from the initial excitement of the first contact to the dreadful realization that the humans are no longer in control of their destinies. Writer-producer Kenneth Johnson’s breathtaking audacity to deal with a subject as serious as Nazis and the Holocaust in a medium that could have easily been a trivial shoot ‘em up adventure is enhanced by his stubborn refusal to give the miniseries a Hollywood happy ending. Which is not to say that the ending isn’t optimistic, as an official “Resistance” is formed, makes contact with an anti-fascist “Fifth Column” within the Visitors’ ranks and sends a distress signal out across the cosmos (for help, or worse), but it does imply a long struggle.

But not too long, it turns out. The original “V” miniseries was too big a hit in the ratings to stand alone, so NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff revived it one year later in “V: The Final Battle.” Kenneth Johnson is long gone by this point, and some of the ridiculous action-adventure tropes I recall as a kid first start to appear. For instance, it appears to be ridiculously easy for our Resistance heroes to steal a Visitor shuttle and steal away aboard any of the motherships, and the Visitors, apparently, couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with those laser guns of theirs.

Still, the cast of Resistance fighters displays some charming chemistry, and the (not-so) friendly rivalry between Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside) is probably what I liked most about the series, as a kid and now. And the second miniseries closed out each episode with a great “shock” cliffhanger ending: the Resistance fighters ripping the skin off of Visitor envoy John on live teevee and the birth of the snake-tongued alien-human hybrid Elizabeth and her afterbirth. As promised by the title, the Resistance does drives the Visitors off of the planet by cooking up a virus that supposedly turns everything on the planet into poison for them. Despite some hokiness, “The Final Battle” would have been a satisfying conclusion to “V,” but, alas, NBC went to the well one time too many.

The following season, “V” returned as a regular weekly series. The virus, it turns out, only works in colder climates, so the Visitors return to fight the humans in Los Angeles. The writing for the regular series was frequently insulting to human intelligence. For instance, the Visitor motherships were hiding behind the moon, where no Toys-R-Us telescope could possibly see them. The female Visitor leaders have sewn shoulder pads into their military uniforms and frequently engage in “Dynasty” style catfights. Our heroes in the Resistance spend most episodes traveling to small towns in peril and helping people rise up against the Visitors and/or their collaborators. It’s kinda like the A-Team, except the bad guys don’t stand up and dust themselves off after getting blown out of their jeeps, and, instead of Mr. T, we have the hybrid “Starchild,” Elizabeth, who sheds her skin and becomes an 18-year-old hottie and frequent deus ex machina.

This, finally, was a show that a five year old could love. It’s lots of derring do, and ripping skin off scaly lizard people, laser gun and space shuttle dogfights, and the aliens constantly eat disgusting things like worms, rats and tarantulas. Apparently, five-year-olds weren’t a big enough audience to keep the show on the air. As a cost-saving measure, “V” vaporized half of its cast in the middle of its first and only season and was eventually cancelled after 19 episodes. Apparently, there is still a cult of fans for the program and rumors of a revival on the Sci Fi network. “V” does deserve a proper revival, now that television science fiction is finally displaying more brains and sophistication. Perhaps the next writers can delve deeper into the issues of fascist collaboration and resistance that were hinted at in the terrific original miniseries.

For the first time in 25 years the percentage of U.S. workers represented by a union has increased. A report from Ben Zipperer and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research attributes the increase to large membership gains in California - over 200,000 of the 310,000 new union members were organized there - and more modest gains in northeastern states like New York and New Jersey, which were able to offset the continued decline of unionized manufacturing jobs.

The slight uptick in the unionized percentage, to 12.1% from 12.0%, was the first recorded since the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting figures in 1983, and, as the report’s authors caution, may reflect a statistical variation. The actual number of unionized workers has, after all, increased in most years since John Sweeney was elected president of the AFL-CIO on a call for a greater commitment to new organizing. However, those gains in membership could not keep pace with the new jobs added to the overall economy, causing declining percentages of union membership. But now as we slouch towards a recession, the economy is adding significantly fewer new jobs, so that union membership could actually gain as a percentage of the workforce.

But that’s only part of the story. These membership increases reflect a shift in organizing strategy to consolidate our gains in states and industries where we are relatively strong. Tens of thousands of those new union members were public sector home child care providers. Many thousands more were teachers and clerical and administrative employees in states like Kansas and New Mexico, where public sector employees recently regained the right to form unions. In the private sector, gains were made in health care and construction, where strong unions used their leverage to compel employers to recognize and deal with newly organized workers outside of the increasingly hostile and anti-union National Labor Relations Board.

This strategic shift leaves huge swaths of workers - in the South and Midwest, in private sector white collar occupations, etc. - unrepresented and with little hope of organizing. It is, however, a plan to survive and fight another day. Every newly organized workplace that wins a good contract is an object lesson to friends, family and neighbors that we can organize and win. It means more financial resources for international unions and the AFL-CIO and Change To Win to commit to organizing elsewhere. And it’s more union voters to elect a government that will reform the union-busting laws. It helps ensure that there will continue to be a union movement, for now.

Daniel Day-Lewis is pure, foreboding menace in “There Will Be Blood.” Although, wheh he finally unleashes the full force of his menace, it is not entirely what is expected. Nor, likewise, is the blood alluded to in the title precisely what one would expect from the cleverly edited promotional trailers, although plenty of the red stuff flows.

Based upon the Upton Sinclair novel, “Oil!,” the film could easily have been mere anti-capitalist propaganda, but director Paul Thomas Anderson focuses more on themes of family, ambition and envy. Anderson doesn’t make short films and “Blood” is no exception, clocking in at nearly three hours. But whereas previous movies featured a large, Altman-esque cast of characters, Day-Lewis is the sole, scene-chewing focus of nearly every frame of “There Will Be Blood.” It’s one of those performances that shouts, give me my fucking Oscar or I’ll cut your fucking throat. Or bash your head in with a bowling pin 17 years from now. It’s a mesmerizing performance, and easily worth a six and a half dollars matinee ticket.

Thank goodness for the Hollywood unions for providing a little basic trade union education for the American public. It’s been so rare to see aggressive, proactive union activity that most people clearly don’t understand how this stuff is supposed to work. The fact that most late-night talk show hosts are crossing picket lines to return to the air without their writers, while David Letterman gets to go back with his writers and their union’s blessing is inexplicably confusing to some. Apparently even some producers don’t understand. One anonymous weasel (presumably from NBC) whined, “Regardless of who technically owns what, they are now intentionally putting us at a competitive disadvantage.” That’s how this works, sweetheart. If the striking Writers Guild was affecting everyone’s business equally, how would that compel the producers to settle?

I’ve written about “me-too” agreements before. These are contracts wherein an employer agrees in advance to the terms of an industrywide agreement and buys its way out of a labor dispute. Whatever the other guys agree to, we’ll do the same. Just please don’t strike us. That is precisely the kind of contract that Letterman’s Worldwide Pants company, independently of the major networks, has signed with the Writers Guild. The other late night guys whine that Letterman’s getting off on a technicality (Letterman negotiated to own his own show when he moved to CBS, while Leno pushed Letterman out of the way to take over Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” on NBC’s penurious terms). Do not let them obscure the fact that they planned to put Letterman at a competitive disadvantage by crossing the picket lines to return to the air, while Letterman held out for his writers.

And why? Jay Leno is retiring in a few years, and could have stood his ground, except I suspect that he secretly hates unions. Carson Daly, who enthusiastically went back on the air first, is the kind of unprincipled, talentless careerist who cynically calculated that by being the only host presenting new programs that people might finally watch his dreck. And Conan O’Brien, I can only assume, was worried that NBC might take the promised “Tonight Show” away from him if he stayed out with his writers.

If all of the late night programs had stayed in reruns, they would have maintained their audience share. Yes, I’m sure there are less viewers overall for reruns, but the proportion of viewers would remain the same, so that all of the shows would lose revenue equally, and thus, in a way, not really lose out at all. But now David Letterman gets to go back with fresh, scripted material and access to all of Hollywood’s stars, while Leno, who is painfully unfunny even with his team of writers, has to vamp and ad-lib for an hour each night with only the help of his own wit and whatever college professor or book author he can scrounge up. If it does place not only Leno and Conan, but all of NBC at a competitive disadvantage, then it places pressure on the NBC-Universal corporate ownership structure to settle the damn contract. Which is exactly the trade union purpose of a “me too” agreement.