I know as well as any keen observer that labor unions cause hair loss, teen pregnancy, sexual dysfunction, adolescent obesity and poor gas mileage.

I have heard repeatedly from the dashboard sages how unions are plotting to make a mess of darn near everything, with the possible exception of the union hall and the detailing on the expensive imports all union bosses drive.

Of course, the word is out that Superior Court Judge Patricia Hurst was clearly paging through the union playbook this week when she slammed the judicial brakes on Governor Carcieri’s plans to hit some state employees with heavier health-care costs.

And I’ve lost count of how many letters to the editor have pointed out that unions are at the dark, evil heart of every problem since high winds and bad skin.

So the obvious question is: Where would we be without unions?

I refer, quickly, to that wonderful treasure from Chicago, Studs Terkel, who has been around for almost a century and knows the lessons of history. He also laments how so many people seem to forget them.

Terkel is a radio commentator and an author and probably as good an interviewer as has ever taken to the microphone or the pad and pen. He knows how to talk.

And he worries. He worries about where his country is going, about how so much that is meaningless draws more attention than the things that truly matter.

I had the pleasure of talking with him several years ago and wishing that the conversation could continue for a day or two. I asked him about labor unions, a subject that often comes up when he considers the state of things.

He told me of the young couple who didn’t like unions at all:

“There were a couple young people I was talking to and they were violently anti-union. But they knew nothing about the history of labor. The young have no sense of yesterday. She was sort of a yuppie girl, and she said she hates unions, they’re terrible. So I asked her how many hours a day she worked and she said eight hours. And I asked her why she didn’t work 15 hours a day. People did. I asked her how she thinks she got to work eight hours a day. People were hanged for that right. She had not the slightest semblance of what the labor movement is all about. You look at newspapers in this country and you’ll see a business page, but there’s no labor page. I think in some sense we’ve lost a sense of history, of who we are.”

The truth of what he said has become more apparent, more difficult to challenge, in the years since we talked. All Terkel seems to be asking is that we think less about right now and more about how the heck we got here. And if we do that, we just might find that things we thought played no part in our lives played a very significant part. Labor unions, for example.

Sure, some unions are a lot better than others. Some abuse their power and some don’t use it enough. But it is important to remember that there are many people, like the oblivious young couple Studs Terkel talked to, who enjoy the benefits of unions without ever being a member of one. Those who took the risks, who challenged old abuses and put their livelihoods on the line, created better working conditions that extended far beyond their own small memberships and spilled into places where “union” might be a dirty word.

It would seem good to keep that in mind before we get really silly and start blaming unions for problems that are due to simple human stupidity, not collective bargaining.

bkerr@projo.com