If there's a model for labor negotiations in the future, it's the model of the Major League Baseball Player's Association, which works out very bare-bones collective agreements featuring salary basements and basic work rules and benefits, but doesn't punish high achievers for the good of the benchwarmers. Unions have been grotesquely slow to learn the benefits of flexibility in the workplace. A strategy for the lumpenproletariat has no future in a country where even the fattest of fat slobs like to think of themselves as all-stars.