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Wishing all members a safe and happy Labor day.. Enjoy the day brought to you by the Labor movement..
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Re: Happy Labor Day 2021..
Happy Labor Day! 3 day weekends are great. 4,5,6,7,8,9...etc are better. -
Re: Happy Labor Day 2021..
Happy Labor Day to all
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Re: Happy Labor Day 2021..
Why most Americans no longer honor unions on Labor Day
Labor Day was once the nation’s most blatantly political national holiday — created by the trade-union movement to celebrate the right of working people to bargain collectively and to stage strikes to press their demands. But no more, for good reason.
Even before Congress created the federal holiday in 1894, New York hosted the nation’s first Labor Day parade as 10,000 workers took off from their jobs to march from City Hall to Union Square. As the movement grew, so did the parades and celebrations.
How times have changed. Today, Labor Day is largely an occasion for sales, end-of-summer cookouts and back-to-school preparations. Why? Because the movement has become as irrelevant to most Americans as the medieval guilds that preceded it — and all too often a protector of privileges rather than a force for the oppressed.
In 1954, more than one in three American workers was a union member. Today, it’s barely over 6 percent of private-sector workers — but, in a huge shift, more than a third of public-sector workers (nearly 35 percent). Indeed, more than half of all union members today work for government: 7.2 million, vs. 7.1 million in the private sector, a figure that includes a lot of “quasi-public” jobs in sectors like health care.
Yet even as pro-union a president as Franklin Delano Roosevelt — who did more than any other chief executive to extend organized labor’s reach — was sure that unions had no place in government service. As he wrote in 1937: “All government workers should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
And strikes by public employees, he wrote, are “unthinkable and intolerable.”
The way FDR’s warning has gone by the wayside is probably a major reason public support for unions is way down — and why huge Labor Day parades are a distant memory.
But a day of thanks and a public salute still is due to all those working men and women who — in the words of one of the holiday’s originators, AFL co-founder Peter McGuire — “from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.”
https://nypost.com/2021/09/05/why-mo...-on-labor-day/Comment
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