As for worker productivity, it has improved because of technology, because workers feel they have more at stake in an enterprise if they're treated like human beings instead of interchangeable and disposable production units, and because employers have been forced to compete for workers by offering them better conditions due to competition with other employers. (Competition! What a concept!) The virtue of entrepreneurs or corporate bureaucrats had nothing to do with it.

Reading that over, you almost sound like technology and capital just appear under cabbage leaves, and have nothing to do with entrepreneurs.

Unions served a valuable purpose back when labor was basically muscle, and one person off the street could easily be replaced by others. As our industrial base progressed to more complex areas, skills and experience began to count for a lot more than a pair of strong arms. Employees became a lot more than "labor." Since then, the market has handled most labor issues on its own. Fewer than 3 percent of hourly workers get the Federal minimum wage or less, and that's not out of the goodness of the wagepayer's heart.

It's worth noting that many of the worker advances you talk about were brought about by unions long before there were specific government laws addressing them.

For the record, I am irritated by having to adopt the socialist "worker/boss" paradigm for this kind of conversation. It's part of a sour class concept that doesn't apply any more, and is most often exploited by collectivists for their own purposes.

There are those who produce (and those who don't). The producers work with their hands, their minds, and their experience to create new products and services, and create actual new wealth in the process. The idea that wealth is something that is created, not just moved around, is amazingly hard to get across to some people, although they can see it by just looking around.

The person behind a desk working a computer is a producer. So is the person working the assembly line, the one moving numbers behind a ledger, or the one working in a lab. For that matter, that old guy on the corner selling hand-made candles to make a living is a producer, and in the large scheme of things, and particularly in this blessed American culture, is entitled to look the wealthiest businessman right in the eye.

And who knows? In this country, that candle-maker might be in a corner office someday. Or that wealthy businessman might have started out without wealth himself. Most of them do.

Watch the interactions between a waiter or clerk and a customer in an American place of business sometime. With a few rude exceptions, most of the time the interaction is one between social equals. One just happens to be on a different side of the counter that day. There are a lot of countries where the idea that these two people inhabit the same universe would puzzle both of them.

Maybe my experiences in business have been more pleasant than yours. I have lived in Silicon Valley for many years, and been involved in startups. I have dealt with those who have built something out of nothing in many fields, and many of them are now richer than hell. The "corporate bureaucrats" aren't the movers and shakers in this neck of the woods.