My wife, Martha, received a breast cancer diagnosis in 2020. I haven’t publicly discussed her cancer before, and I’m not going to do so now, except to make the point that her treatment would have bankrupted us had we not had health insurance. The thing of it is, though, by the time of her cancer diagnosis, we would have already been bankrupt because of a rare lung infection she’d developed a few years before, which required a major surgery and a lengthy recuperation. Both times, our financial lives were saved because of health insurance. Union health insurance.

Monday was Labor Day. Most people don’t think about the holiday too much, except as a marker for the unofficial end of summer. The Kamala Harris campaign celebrated the holiday in Pittsburgh, where Harris and President Biden appeared at a packed union hall to mark the labor movement and the progress it has made for all American workers.

“Everywhere I go,” Harris said, “I tell people, look, you may not be a union member, you better thank a union member; for the five-day work week, you better thank a union member; for sick leave, you better thank a union member. For paid leave, you better thank a union member for vacation time. Because what we know is when union wages go up, everybody’s wages go up.”

My own entry to union membership came when I was a young actor who’d just booked his first job as a Puerto Rican street hustler on the first season of NYPD Blue. (I........

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