Happy Labor Day

[BonosSaint]

Happy Labor Day.

From today's Washington Post

The last Labor Day?
By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: September 4

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect.

Imagine a Republican saying this: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

These heretical thoughts would inspire horror among our friends at Fox News or in the Tea Party. They’d likely label them as Marxist, socialist or Big Labor propaganda. Too bad for Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, who offered those words in his annual message to Congress in 1861. Will President Obama dare say anything like this in his jobs speech this week?

As for the unions, they are often treated in the media as advocates of arcane work rules, protectors of inefficient public employees and obstacles to the economic growth our bold entrepreneurs would let loose if only they were free from labor regulations.

So it would take a brave man to point out that unions “grew up from the struggle of the workers — workers in general but especially the industrial workers — to protect their just rights vis-a-vis the entrepreneurs and the owners of the means of production,” or to insist that “the experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life.”

That’s what Pope John Paul II said (the italics are his) in the 1981 encyclical “Laborem Exercens.” Like Lincoln, John Paul repeatedly asserted “the priority of labor over capital.”

That the language of Lincoln and John Paul is so distant from our experience today is a sign of an enormous cultural shift. In scores of different ways, we paint investors as the heroes and workers as the sideshow. We tax the fruits of labor more vigorously than we tax the gains from capital — resistance to continuing the payroll tax cut is a case in point — and we hide workers away while lavishing attention on those who make their livings by moving money around.

Consider that what the media call economics reporting is largely finance reporting. Once upon a time, a lively band of labor reporters covered the world of work and unions. If you stipulate that the decline of unions makes the old labor beat a bit less compelling, there are still tens of millions of workers who do their jobs every day. But when the labor beat withered, it was rarely replaced by a work beat. Workers have vanished.

But we are now inundated with news (and “news”) about the world of capital. CNBC and the other financial media are for investors what ESPN is for sports junkies. We cheer the markets, learn the obscure language of hedge fund managers and get to know some of the big investors in off-field interviews. Workers are regarded as factors of production. At best, they’re consumers; at worst, they’re “labor costs” cutting into profits and the sacred stock price.

Workers have faded away in both high and popular culture, too. Can you point to someone “who makes art out of working-class lives by refusing to prettify them”?

The phrase comes from a 2006 essay by the critic William Deresiewicz, who observed that we have few novelists such as John Steinbeck or John Dos Passos who take the lives of working people seriously. Nor do we have television shows along the lines of “The Honeymooners” or even “All in the Family,” which were parodies of an affectionate sort. “First we stopped noticing members of the working class,” Deresiewicz wrote, “and now we’re convinced they don’t exist.”

In his extraordinary book “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class,” Jefferson Cowie spoke of how little we identify working-class people with their labor. “Workers occasionally reappeared in public discourse as ‘Reagan Democrats’ — later as ‘NASCAR Dads,’ ” he wrote, “or the victims of another plant shutdown or as irrational protectionist and protesters of free trade, but rarely did they appear as workers.”

With the worker disappearing from our media and our consciousness, isn’t it only a matter of time before Labor Day falls off the calendar? As long as it’s there, it should shame us about our cool indifference to the heroism of those who go to work every day.

 

[financeguy]

Teamsters union president James Hoffa would say it all again if he could, he told TPM Monday.

Hoffa riled up Fox News and the right wing Monday with a Labor Day speech in Detroit in which he called Republican members of Congress "sons of bitches" and said union workers are ready to "go to war" with the tea party next year and "take out" Republicans at the ballot box.

Hoffa said he'd say the exact same words all over again.

"I would because I believe it," he said. "They've declared war on us. We didn't declare war on them, they declared war on us. We're fighting back. The question is, who started the war?"

Teamsters President: 'No Regrets' After Fiery Speech Draws Right-Wing Criticism | TPMDC

 

[the iron horse]

Nonuion guy checking in here.

Hope you you had a great Labor Day

 

[financeguy]

Nonuion guy checking in here.

You're a teacher and you're not in a union?

 

[the iron horse]

You're a teacher and you're not in a union?

No.

Remember, I'm a Libertarian.


One goal of the Libertarian Party is to do away with the U.S Department
of Education.


Oh! Happy Day

 

[financeguy]

No.

Remember, I'm a Libertarian.


One goal of the Libertarian Party is to do away with the U.S Department
of Education.


Oh! Happy Day

Is your salary equivalent to teachers of similar tenure to yourself that are union members?

 

[financeguy]

Also, and I realise this is mainly a pro-establishment RW forum, but four responses to a labour day thread? Even the dogmatic liberals haven't posted, what's up?

Are labor supporters so cowed into submission that they don't even bother any more?

Fuck's sakes. If youse don't stand up for your rights, who the feck else do you suppose is going to do so?

 

[BonosSaint]

I was pleased to get one response. I'm thinking there is a class war of some kind anyway. I've gotten a little more impatient with it recently, a little more in the trenches.

 

[Canadiens1131]

Also, and I realise this is mainly a pro-establishment RW forum, but four responses to a labour day thread? Even the dogmatic liberals haven't posted, what's up?

Are labor supporters so cowed into submission that they don't even bother any more?

Fuck's sakes. If youse don't stand up for your rights, who the feck else do you suppose is going to do so?

It's strange, I'm for unions on principle but I feel they have been detrimental in some recent cases (see Waiting for Superman and its documentation of how bad teachers stay in the system, or the replacement of auto workers with robots for some stages of assembly.

To be quite honest I feel like auto workers should be getting laid off instead of going into work and being paid to sit in a room to play cards for eight hours due to union power in Detroit. Of course they need some kind of government -encouraged severance and retraining, but you can't beat structural unemployment in the long run. There are just industries where unions are artificially keeping workers in positions that shouldn't reasonably exist anymore and those workers need some help and some retraining for a new career track.

I'm a huge liberal pussy, but sometimes cold hard economics just wins out, you know?

 

[BVS]

No.

Remember, I'm a Libertarian.

One goal of the Libertarian Party is to do away with the U.S Department
of Education.

Oh! Happy Day

We don't want you teaching your biased, revisionist, racist version of the civil war to our children. That's why we need the DOE.

 

[Kieran McConville]

If I had my way the luddites would have overthrown the government and instituted a new cromwellian commonwealth.

wait, am I on the right forum?

 

[the iron horse]

We don't want you teaching your biased, revisionist, racist version of the civil war to our children. That's why we need the DOE.

When did I say that?

 

[BVS]

When did I say that?

Part of the DOE's design is so that personal revisions don't get taught in the classroom. And your version of the civil war is similar to those that believe the holocaust didn't exist.

 

[financeguy]

Is your salary equivalent to teachers of similar tenure to yourself that are union members?

Iron Horse, you want to answer this?