Labor Day not about workers anymore [View All]

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/09/03/s1b_LABORDAY_0903.html

By RON HAYES

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Monday, September 03, 2007

Labor Day used to be about labor.

Before the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy telethon and all those "spectacular" end-of-summer sales came along, Labor Day was about honoring working Americans.



There were Labor Day parades and Labor Day picnics. Now the parades have all but disappeared, and the picnics aren't what they used to be.

"I can very distinctly remember the Labor Day picnics during the war," says Jim Weldon, who retired this year as business manager for Local 728 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers after 51 years in the movement. "They had a much better turnout then. But we still have the AFL-CIO picnic in Okeeheelee Park, and a lot of our retired members go. I'll be there. There'll be 600 or 700 people there."

And then he pauses to reconsider.

"Well, that would be on the high end," he adds. "Probably more like 400 or 500."

Any way you look at it, labor is laboring.

Last year, only 12 percent of America's employed wage and salary workers belonged to a union, down from 12.5 percent the year before and a drop of 326,000 people, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The labor movement in America has seen a steady decline in membership since 1983, the first year for which comparable data were available, when 20.1 percent of workers were union men and women.

FULL story at link.