Monday, September 5, 2011

LABOR DAY 2011

LONG LIVE LABOR UNIONS!

Image:
Industrial Workers of the World, published in Solidarity, 1917;
Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh, 1998

1 comment:

  1. The unfortunate reality of today is that, generally speaking, labor in America is superfluous.

    The 1% Club will always need servants and gardeners, and as long as the 1% chooses to spend their dollars going out to eat, restaurants will still need waitresses and dishwashers, and high-end toy stores will continue to show a profit, but living wage jobs for American citizens in the manufacturing sector have all been outsourced to the country(s) with the cheapest labor costs.

    Some people argue that our unions are the reason these industries have moved to China and Mexico, and any other nation that has no labor standards and obscenely low wages.

    These people are wrong. It is not the fault of the unions. The unions brought us the 40 hour work week, the "weekend", paid vacation, healthcare benefits, workplace safety standards and workers rights, to name only a few of the things I am grateful to unions for.

    What motivated the now multinational corporations to move their plants overseas was greed and a total lack of patriotism. A total lack of patriotism because even if the Supreme Court says that corporations are people too, they are not "American" people. They are, as their name suggests, multinationals and they owe their allegiance to no one country, certainly not the U$A.

    God bless the unions, but they are becoming as superfluous as we, the American working class, have become.

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