Before Labor Day was commercialized into the consumer driven spectacle of today, the worker was recognized for contribution to American. Following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, the United States Congress unanimously voted to approve rush legislation that made Labor Day a national holiday; President Grover Cleveland signed it into law six days after the end of the strike. The bill was originally proposed to Congress by a Union official. Today Unions are demonized in the press and government legislation undermines their bargaining power that once gave labor a chance to win better conditions and a fair wage. With the great corporations controlling media content and corrupting government officials, labor once again has been relegated to the status of a second class citizen. Rather than being honored for their contribution to society they have been betrayed. Their jobs sent overseas, their pension plans and benefits that once offered security, gone. Where once a worker could make a living wage and support a family, wages have stagnated for more than forty years and minimium wage adjusted for inflation would currently be close to twenty-five dollars an hour. Right to work states have nullified workers position, giving management an unfair advantage. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a champion of the working class, was in progress on an economic bill of rights. Roosevelt believed: "We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." With corporate interests making record profits, worker wages are at an all time low. In the words of John F Kennedy "Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self determinism is but a slogan if the future holds no hope
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 22:37:09 +0000
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