I grew up in a household that neatly displayed its affiliations in the bathroom magazine rack. There were copies of Ebony, Essence and Jet that my dad brought home from work so that we could be in touch with our blackness in magazine form, and the union newsletters that explained why his job was worth having.

He worked on the assembly line at a car plant in southern Wisconsin, work that regularly sent him to the hospital for surgeries to drain extra fluid from his knees. But those procedures were covered by union-negotiated medical insurance, and the time he had to miss work for them was handled by union-negotiated contractual provisions. Each time he healed, he could go right back to the job he loved in order to provide for our family.

Memories of my dad’s union job feel like they belong in a museum, and that’s only partly because I’m talking about the long-gone 1980s and ’90s. Many jobs added to the American economy these days not only come without unions but also don’t even provide full-time employment. The lack of unionization has sent the bottom flying out of the middle class.

Workers are being deprived of the advantages my dad’s labor union negotiated for my family: wages that helped us save for a down payment on a house after years of moving from apartment to apartment; health care that covered, in addition to Dad’s knee surgeries, treatment for my sister’s asthma, my brother’s autism, my mother’s high blood pressure and Dad’s early-onset prostate cancer.