"Insidious anti-labor bias hurts workers"

Joel Connelly:

In what I hope was an early-morning miscue, the weekend KPLU newsreader recently told listeners that "labor bosses" were gathering in Wenatchee for the Washington State Labor Council's annual convention.

Defining terminology, on the airwaves and deftly inserted in mainstream media, has been one of the right wing's small triumphs in forging America's new Gilded Age.

Anyone who protests social injustice is a "bleeding heart." Those who commit themselves to its prevention are "do-gooders." "Liberal" is practically a curse word. Anybody who preaches reconciliation is "soft" -- on crime, on communism, on "Islamic fascism."

Union officials get labeled as "bosses," while executives who slash corporate payrolls or dump employee pension plans get celebrated as "cost cutters" and "downsizers."

A generation ago, Sen. Robert Kennedy was joining Cesar Chavez as the leader of California's impoverished farm workers broke a fast by taking communion. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was checking into a Memphis motel to continue his support of striking sanitation workers.

Nowadays, vulgar billionaire Donald Trump gets feted on a TV show where his function is to say, "You're fired!"