My father served as a union president — a teachers union president — in Suffolk County nearly four decades ago, in the days when educators like him were given little respect, and even lower wages. He fought hard to professionalize teaching to ensure that future educators were accorded a level of respect similar to what other well-educated Americans — doctors, attorneys, engineers — received.

Some of my earliest memories are of the two of us standing side by side outside a Patchogue supermarket in the early 1970s. We wore shiny buttons on our shirts and white Styrofoam boaters. My father was campaigning for a state lawmaker who was bold enough to support higher wages for teachers at a time when educators were expected to — and, in many ways, did — accept vows of poverty.

I'm proud that my dad was a union officer, and played a role in helping to earn today’s educators the respect — and the wages — they deserve.

That, in part, was why I was miffed to read my colleague Alfonse D’Amato’s column “When will the unions wake up?” (May 20-26), in which he referred to the state’s unions as “ravenous” and called them one of New York’s two “biggest enemies” — the other being the state lawmakers who support unions.

Funny, I thought the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center were New York's biggest enemies. And what of the drug cartels? Or the mafia?

The unions? These are New York’s biggest enemies?

Unionists are decent, law-abiding, middle-class men and women who do the state’s business, who make the trains run on time, literally and figuratively. Yes, they lobby our lawmakers in Albany, as do any number of corporations, nonprofit groups, even foreign governments. In organizing into and acting as unions, our state workers — any workers, for that matter — are simply exercising their constitutional rights of freedom of speech and assembly.