Millions of California workers don't have much to celebrate this Labor Day. State unemployment once again has crept up to a lacerating 12 percent, second-highest in the nation, and the specter looms of a double-dip recession.

The high jobless rate doesn't do justice to the economic trauma working families face. Overall, almost one in four California workers – a Depression-era number – is searching for a full-time job.

An emerging danger is a "lost generation" scarred by the hopelessness and despair of extended job loss. One-third of the unemployed have been out of work for a year or more. And a new study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation indicates that more than one-third of California children are in families where no parent has a full-time, year-round job.

Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans are reliving the Gilded Age. The top 10 percent, according to UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, sucked up 98 percent of income gains over the last three decades, leaving 2 percent for everyone else. The image that comes to mind is John D. Rockefeller handing out dimes in 1910 to the less fortunate.

If we didn't have unions today, we'd have to invent them. Unions have fought for dignity on the job and a decent life off the job, paving the road to the middle class for millions of families. They have been the voice of working Americans – members and nonmembers alike – on issues from extended unemployment benefits to Medicare.

"You don't have to love unions," Paul Krugman wrote, "to recognize that they're among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy."

And this is precisely why they face such a fierce onslaught right now. Republican governors and presidential candidates, among others, have sought to dismantle unions and collective bargaining across the public and private sectors.

Nonetheless, in the midst of a floundering economy and partisan attacks, unions are seeking to redefine themselves for the 21st century.

Listen to Bob King, the charismatic new president of the United Auto Workers, who brings to mind the union's legendary president Walter Reuther. Like Reuther, King has a deep moral core and a strong commitment to social justice, but he knows an innovative, even radical, approach is essential for the union to survive.

"We have reinvented our union," he recently said. He wants to define a new bargain with Detroit in which the UAW provides high-octane fuel for a more competitive auto industry and autoworkers share in that success. Beyond that he wants to ensure that a revitalized industry creates more middle-class jobs across the United States, which fuels the economy and benefits Americans well beyond the auto industry.

On the shop floor in the GM assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio – the place where the term "blue collar blues" was born in the early 1970s – this new attitude translates into a UAW member developing an alternative windshield sealer that saved the company $200,000.

Wait a minute, you might be thinking, isn't this the industry that just collapsed and required billions from Washington to rescue it? Yes, it's that industry, which is now an industrial success story at a critical moment for the economy.

All the Detroit automakers are earning profits for the first time in seven years, and Chrysler and GM are paying off government loans early. Quality and productivity in unionized U.S. plants are now among the best in the industry. Thousands of laid-off workers are being called back to the job in some of the most depressed areas of the country, and thousands of new workers are being hired.

The UAW is now wrapping up national negotiations with the Detroit automakers. It is considering linking more worker pay to profitability and performance, a bold departure from previous practice. Why? To lower fixed costs – what the industry has to pay whatever happens to sales – so that more new jobs are created domestically. The strategy has risks, but King feels that an unsustainable status quo is far riskier.

At the same time, he is pushing strongly to raise the $14 hourly wage of "second-tier" new hires so that these autoworkers can once again look toward middle class, not food stamp eligibility for their families. Solidarity remains the soul of the labor movement.

And the union is looking beyond the factory floor. "The 21st century UAW makes as a priority the interests of consumer safety, energy efficiency and environmental protection," King says. And he emphasizes that workers sharing in the gains of a revitalized industry secures the middle class going forward both in the United States and globally.

King points out that a free press and free unions are the cornerstones of a free society and that "the right to organize unions is the First Amendment for workers." With this in mind, the UAW is laying the groundwork for an innovative new organizing drive that, if necessary, will enlist the support of unions and social movements throughout the world.

In the public sector, where the fiscal crisis has hammered services at the state and local level, Republican governors have taken to demonizing public sector unions – those representing teachers, firefighters, police and others – as the source of the problems.

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie reportedly told an audience at a Boys and Girls Club that schools were short of supplies because of greedy teachers and unions. And he followed by saying that if teachers really valued learning they would have skipped the union's state convention where they were "having a party."

Educational historian Diane Ravitch points out that this logic ignores "globalization or deindustrialization or poverty" let alone "predatory financial practices" as contributing factors to poor school performance, but instead places the blame squarely on "the public schools, their teachers and their unions."

If unions are at the root of failure, how then do we explain so many poor schools in right-to-work states where unions are weak or nonexistent? And the overwhelming problem in the 89,000-teacher New York City school system is how to inspire and retain good teachers, not how to unload the few bad ones. Forty percent leave after three years while less than 1 percent wound up in the notorious, though now-defunct, "rubber rooms" where teachers were paid to sit, and not all for just cause. Administrators can be as petty, partisan, overbearing and mistaken as the rest of us.

What's wrong with eviscerating collective bargaining? Listen to Courtney Johnson, a middle school teacher from a small town in Ohio. "The simple fact is that teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions," she told a congressional committee earlier this year on her first trip to Washington, D.C. "We need to have a voice at the table so that we can speak up for what we know our students need." Absent this presence, she continued, "our first-hand, real-world experience is not at the table, and our students are the ones who will lose."

The divide is not necessarily between the "enlightened reformers" and the "hide-bound unions" but often between the "technocrats" and the "teachers," between autocratic distant planners and those in the classroom.

"I teach a ninth-grade humanities class," Johnson continued. "In my class music, art, history and literature become one. The other day we were studying protest songs in connection with 'Animal Farm.' We listened to John Lennon and Billie Holiday and Bob Marley and Neil Young. When the bell rang at the end of class, one of my students turned around and said, 'I don't want to leave.' Finally, education made sense to her."

Love the teacher, but hate the union? In this case Courtney Johnson is the union. Of course, unions have gone down blind alleys and made mistakes, but isn't the voice of teachers vital at the bargaining table as well as the classroom?

On this Labor Day, let's remember that workers and unions ought to be considered part of the solution, not demonized as the problem. A strong, vital labor movement is more important than ever in these troubled times. It can contribute to a sustained recovery, ensure that working Americans share in it, and provide the political voice that is essential in a democratic society.

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Harley Shaiken is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in labor and the global economy.

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