Political Scientist Michael Parenti catalogued seven generalizations about the way the news media create anti-union messaging--from painting workers as greedy, to omitting the salary of management or depicting public officials (like Mayor Nutter) as neutral. Using this lens to dissect the coverage of the SEPTA strike, it becomes clear that local media like the Inquirer and Daily News have a dangerous anti-union bias, once again making the case that to build our own movement we need our own media.

My ancestors immigrated to the US for the assortment of typical reasons we all know about, including escaping the hostile climate towards Jews in Eastern Europe, and leaving Ireland in search of a better, more secure life.

It wasn't an uncommon story. My great-grandfather supported my Grandmom and her 11 siblings by driving a trolley for the Philadelphia Transportation Company- the precursor to SEPTA. He and his wife raised my grandmom and her brothers and sisters in a small Southwest Philadelphia row home.

My great-grandfather's oldest daughter married my grandfather at a young age. My grandfather played a little minor league baseball, and with a high school diploma in hand, went to work at the Aerospace program of General Electric (with a trip to the Army mixed in for good measure). Like many Americans in that time, he worked his ass off, never took a sick day in his life, and steadily moved up at GE, receiving promotions and increased responsibilities, letting him provide his 6 daughters, including my mom, with a 1960's style middle-class life, including a suburban home in South Jersey.

My mom put herself through college, and then grad school, becoming a Physician’s Assistant. She married another descendant of semi-recent immigrants (and another grandfather with an education and a home courtesy of an assist from Uncle Sam), and together they raised a comfortable, middle-class family in Germantown. My mom then took a stressful job at Penn because it provided great tuition benefits, which allowed her to send all three of her kids to wonderful, overpriced liberal arts schools. Two of the three of us have graduate degrees, with the third likely on his way. We live comfortable, privileged, middle class, lives.

From each generation to the next, parents worked to make the lives of their kids easier, and to give them more opportunities than they themselves had. And at each step, they were helped with an implicit and explicit social compact: that Americans could work hard, earn a decent living, and make the lives of their kids better. Signatories of that same compact included unions, big companies like GE, the American government, and quasi public employers like SEPTA’s predecessor, the PTC.

I go through this all thinking about the trolley drivers of today, who are out on strike across the city, because SEPTA will not properly fund their pension. (If you don’t think this is a big deal, ask city workers, who are now dealing with the fact that the city underfunded them for years, how employers underfunding pensions works out.) People I like, including some of my friends, as well as our less-rotund, but still bombastic Governor, seem to think it is incredible that the Transit Workers Union would make 'crazy' demands like SEPTA properly funding their pensions.

Me? Despite their poorly timed, late night decision to walk out, I support the TWU. The social compact that existed from the time of my great-grandfather, the working-class, trolley driving father of 12, all the way to my parents, is slipping away. With desperate poverty, crappy schools, and little to no manufacturing base, social mobility is less and less a realistic option for way too many families in America.

Every single job in Philadelphia that still pays decently, is secure, and doesn’t require a higher education, is an absolute blessing for our society, and is an avenue to empowerment for another family. Each one holds our society together. The higher we pay our janitors and security guards and nursing assistants and hotel workers and construction workers and SEPTA bus drivers and mechanics, the better off we all are. That is why I support the TWU.

SEPTA is on strike.

I spent a lot of my walk to work today thinking about the strike. And although there is a lot more that could be said, more than anything I was happy that in this country--which has been ravaged by corporate interests and a rapid right-wing--that every day people still have some power to organize for change.

Don't get me wrong, the strike sucks. And more than anything this strike is going to hurt low-income and working folks a lot. At a time when things are already pretty bad. And I recognize my privilege to be able to deal relatively easily with a strike as an able-bodied person with no kids who lives four miles from work.

But the onus of the burden to end this strike is not on the workers of Local 234 but on SEPTA management. They are to blame for the inconvenience.

Yes it does annoy me that the strike happened just before rush hour. And the fact is we have all had many experiences with rude SEPTA drivers doesn't help. But the timing of the strike was likely strategic, and there are just as many nice drivers as there are rude ones. And rejecting an offer of a pretty pitiful pay increase for not-that-well-paid workers who do really important work makes sense to me (remember, according to the Inky, the highest paid, longest serving bus driver makes only about $50,000).

But that stuff is all beside the point anyhow.

More than anything you have to support this strike because you have to support unions.

As union density has declined, we have all suffered. We should ALL be in unions. We all need the help of our co-workers sometimes to bargain with bosses who are unfair. Can you imagine how much better "customer service" would be at just about any store if workers were paid and treated better?

And seriously, how often do you see a group of individuals organizing for collective action and making real change? How often? Not much in my opinion. Especially compared to the victories that very rich and very greedy corporations achieve.

SEPTA management may not be a corporation, but it's been run like one when it comes to top-heavy management. And it's an agency that has not often served the city of Philadelphia nearly as well as it should considering how many riders live here. Instead, it's been a suburban and republican patronage mill. Um, and visionary transit and economic development-oriented planning at SEPTA...how's that going?

The tendency of some people who are NOT right-wing folks at all to blame workers astounds me.

Like many Philadelphians, my own middle-class existence can be traced back to the economic stability that my father's union and his father's union before him provided to our family.

The right to organize, collectively bargain and strike if necessary is incredibly important. Lots of us have been able to build paths out of poverty and into the middle-class because of unions. And that path should not be cut off for anyone today.

We can have a conversation later about how much more organized labor needs to do to actually engage and organize the thousands of working class and low-income Philadelphians who have no hope right now of ever joining a union and who will suffer badly because of this strike. That's an important convo to have too.

But today, I support Local 234.