Labor Day 2017

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For visitors from outside the United States, next Monday is Labor Day and Labor Day weekend is the traditional end of summer holiday.

Along with almost every other business, the traditional publishing industry definitely observes (and unofficially extends) the weekend holiday, so blogging material from that source will be a little scarce.

Labor Day was originally promoted by different groups of trade unionists chose a variety of days on which to celebrate labor. major labor unions in the late 19th century to celebrate labor and the men (and later women) who worked, usually at manual labor, for their living.

The first large Labor Day parade was held on September 5, 1882, in New York City. The Central Labor Union (CLU) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) both pushed for a national holiday. In 1887, Oregon was the first state to make Labor Day a state holiday.  It became a federal holiday in 1894, following the deaths of workers at the hands of United States Army and United States Marshals Service during the Pullman Strike of 1894 in Chicago.

The Labor Movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has largely exhausted itself in the United States and the percentage of workers belonging to non-governmental unions has experienced a long decline.

While he’s not a fan of what many of the labor unions have become, PG appreciates some of the songs that reflect an earlier time when the Labor Movement was a vital and growing populist phenomenon.

 

3 thoughts on “Labor Day 2017”

  1. Union Burying Ground?

    The US Supreme Court is about to grant certiorari in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. A finding for the plaintiffs would prevent governments from requiring union membership for government employees, and would also prohibit involuntary deduction of dues or fees from government employees’ pay.

    This would be the most significant labor decision in many years, and there is a plausible case that it would effectively end significant union influence in the US.

  2. What’s also fairly traditional, in my limited experience, is that the NYC publishing industry routinely takes off at least half of every Friday in the summertime – I suppose in order to get an early start driving to their beach houses.

    Once I called with some request, and I was told – ‘Hey take it easy, it’s fun Friday!”

    Such a work ethic. Those twits. On Labor Day they should actually be required to work as hard as an indie author does, just for 12 hours.

  3. there are legions of workers, laborers who have no protections in hours, conditions, prompt pay, injuries. Hopefully there will be a new clean
    model for workers to strongly negotiate. The past is the past. The new reality is there are still men and women and children working in conditions no one would willingly go into except for need of a job.

    Unions in their day were the only means poor and uneducated people had to gain better conditions, pay. Somewhere in time, ‘bosses’ gained control. They were able to resist the pressures some employers put ‘or else’ on their employees to cast election votes as the employer wanted, often promising whomever candidate, he could bring 100 or 5000 votes to elect/reelect in exchange for ‘favors.’

    Unions became like any industry where some at the top decide to use them for personal power and greed.

    It’s not that unions are not needed re conditions, its some of those who run them are not needed for all their lying and siphoning

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