Labor Day lesson: courage, organization and vision

[dcsmart]

The importance of Labor Day, like the importance of all holidays, is lost in the blur of back-to-school sales, beer, backyard bar-b-ques and more beer. Open your paper (if you still read one) and you’ll see the most brazen cut of all: Wal-Mart proclaiming its Labor Day sales, hoping to profit from the holiday gained by the very union movement which Wal-Mart so detests.

If Labor Day—the holiday which honors the labor movement—is a day for taking stock of where we are as workers, 2009 could be a gloomy moment indeed. Workers in general and unionism in particular, have suffered a series of poundings that threaten to take us back in time 100 years.

The numbers are cruel. Unionism is at its lowest percentage of the workforce since 1930. Wages have been basically frozen since 1973 and the gap between the rich and the rest of us is the greatest of any major developed country, except Mexico and Turkey. The one major party in the US, the Republicrats, offers neither recognition nor help, as the debate over health care so clearly demonstrates.

Even though I’m gloomy and angry, I’m hopeful because workers history is a kind of tonic. If workers are so fearful today, there is no better time to remember that Labor Day is a memorial to the courage and spirit of the workers who marched in the first Labor Day parade in New York City in 1882. The holiday is a tribute to their vision of unionism as a powerful social movement.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/labor-day-lesson/