Joseph Sabino Mistick, left, and his father, William, on a train during a trip to Venice in 1999.

I am the son of a UAW man.

He left for work at General Motors' West Mifflin (Pa.) Fisher Body plant every day at dawn and returned home by 4 p.m.

A few other guys in the neighborhood worked there, too. And before it was fashionable to carpool, they all met at the top of the hill and piled into an old Chevy.

Most of the guys were transplants from more urban mill towns. As wages increased, thanks to the unions, blue-collar families could afford small, postwar houses with yards – away from the mill gates – and a good used car to take them to the factory and back.

For the kids, there were experiences unknown to the fathers, like late summer shopping trips for school clothes. Little League baseball, Cub Scouts and other things that were lost in the shuffle in the old mill towns became standard fare. Instead of swimming in the polluted waters of the Monongahela River, as the fathers did as boys, the kids spent idyllic summer afternoons on dusty softball fields. Just over the hill from the mills and factories, these games were played under surprisingly blue skies.

The factories had family days once a year, and everybody would clean up to tour the plant and see how the fathers were building and strengthening America.

Early in their high school senior year, boys suddenly felt important when they were taken on recruiting trips to each of the factories in the area.

Dinner-table conversation for a UAW family included the usual – sports, weather, neighborhood news – but always ended with the social issues of the times. Walter Reuther, the UAW president from 1946 until his death in 1970, was spoken of reverently.

Reuther was a New Dealer and a leader of the great social changes that swept across America during those years. He was a confidant of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. A complex and passionate man, he started out as a Socialist but purged the UAW of Communist influence in the 1940s and ‘50s.

When other labor leaders ducked the civil rights struggle, Reuther marched with Martin Luther King and provided political and financial support. Reuther bailed King out of jail in Birmingham, Ala., and was the only white speaker at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, where King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Under Reuther, UAW families felt special. All the other industries – steel, glass and rubber – produced the parts that autoworkers assembled. American cars drove the American economy, and the UAW created the middle class and fought for a just society.

When times were good, the UAW worked hard to improve the lot of its workers. In pursuit of the great American Dream, the UAW negotiated hard and received higher wages, improved benefits and fought for safer working conditions for its workers when the automakers' profits were up.

And now, in the face of our collapsing economy – not caused by the UAW or the automakers – they are being forced to take less. Among the culprits are those who think that government has no business capping executive compensation but find it essential to cap the wages of the common worker.

It is a new era, however, and the UAW will respond with innovation and sacrifice, as will all good Americans. But it will never give up the fervent commitment to justice. That is the core value of unionism.

As Reuther said: "There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well."

The writer is a lawyer, law professor and political analyst who lives in Pittsburgh. His father is William Mistick of UAW Local 544 who worked 30 years before retiring in 1980. He lives in North Versailles, Pa.

Reprinted with permission of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review