September 5th
The rights of one are as sacred as the rights of a million.
-- Eugene V. Debs
Our movement is of the working people, for the working people, by the working people. . . .There is not a right too long denied to which we do not aspire in order to achieve; there is not a wrong too long endured that we are not determined to abolish.
Samuel Gompers
Today is Labor Day, the day when we should be remembering and celebrating those that worked for worker’s rights. To most people however, Labor Day is the last hurrah for summer, a day off and the last national holiday before Thanksgiving. We’ve forgotten what Labor Day was and should be.
See more on
Labor Day and
How labor won its day
I will spend today thinking about my dad who went railroading in his teens (circa 1914). I remember hearing my dad and his friends talk about what it was like ‘railroading’ before the unions; immensely profitable for the owners but extremely dangerous for the workers.
My dad knew Eugene Debs and for a time worked with him for establishment of the railroad union(s).
In today’s climate the words ‘labor’ and ‘union’ as well as the word ‘liberal’ have become an anathema in certain circles. Granted unions have not behaved as they probably should have but in the final analysis, unions have served the workers better than the owners ever did, in certain areas of course. Without union intervention, overtime pay, vacations and sick leave policies might not exist, nor workplace safety rules protect us. Oops, the current administration made sure that for a considerable percent of the workforce overtime pay is eliminated and because of this administration’s initiatives, for many workers, vacations and sick leaves may also be on the chopping block. From what I’ve been reading in the business sections, CEO and CFO salaries are back up to where they were before the Enron and Worldcom meltdowns. Seems that we didn’t learn a thing or at least the people who work for these overpaid front men for the current administration have learned a lot and that’s bad for the majority of the workforce.
4dk
