I wrote this a few days after the scary incident in early April when a five-foot long gash ripped open atop the fuselage of a Southwest Airlines (SWA) jet while the aircraft was cruising more than six miles in the air.

Movie reviews are not my specialty but this is an exception worth shouting from the rooftops. “The Tradesmen: Making an Art of Work” is an 88-minute social documentary that portrays the real life work, idiosyncrasies, and personal convictions of a multitude of working professionals.

Some of you might be a little puzzled by the headline to this article. What does “spike” mean in this context? It’s derived from journalism jargon in which editors commonly refer to spiking a story - that is, killing it for whatever reason.

A Wall Street Journal article from last summer caught my eye. Titled “Customer Service as a Growth Engine,” the article described efforts by large organizations such as Walgreen, Comcast, American Express and others to pay “more attention to customer service in an effort to increase sales and gain market share in the economic recovery.”

Two things inspired this article. One was reading a take on it by my good friend Al Levi, who writes for Plumbing & Mechanical magazine. Al discusses his father’s absolute prohibition against his sons dating the hired help in their family business.

Subcontractors everywhere are scrambling for work, and what work they’re managing to land isn’t very profitable, but there’s at least one little silver lining amid all the clouds. According to the American Subcontractors Association (ASA), legislators in various states across the country are adopting reforms that ensure prompt and full payment for the work performed by construction subcontractors.

Some things are so counterintuitive it’s a struggle to explain them. For instance, we’re now three years into the Great Recession, in which an estimated 8 million people have lost their jobs and countless millions more are working part-time or underemployed. 

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart is immortalized by his famous statement that while he couldn’t define pornography, “I know it when I see it.” He pretty much spoke for all of us in that regard.

In general, trade associations in many industries are decades removed from their peaks in membership, participation and influence.