This is Labor Day weekend and like most of our other national
holidays, it’s a time when everything is on sale. You name it and
it can be purchased for less this weekend than at any other time
since this past Tuesday.
This is Labor Day weekend and like most of our other national holidays, it’s a time when everything is on sale. You name it and it can be purchased for less this weekend than at any other time since this past Tuesday.
The celebration of Labor Day, along with most of our other national holidays, has been turned into a giant three-day mattress sale. In fact, the reason most of the national holidays fall on three-day weekends is because Congress, way back in the day, folded to pressure from the business lobby. Put bluntly, business didn’t want to give employees a day off in the middle of the week.
So here we are on Labor Day weekend buried under a blizzard of advertising that uses Labor Day as a sales slogan. In the over hyped ad blitz it’s easy to forget why, in the place, a national holiday is called “Labor Day.”
Labor Day honors working men and women. And working men and women, through the labor unions that they organized and joined, are responsible for most of the things we can for granted these days when we go to work.
The right wing pundits and conservative talk radio hacks like Rush Rehab have worked real hard for at least a decade to paint labor unions as one of the big things that is wrong with America.
And Wal-Mart agrees. The nation’s largest retailer, once found in itself in a situation in a Texas town where the meat cutters union had organized the meat department at the Wal-Mart store. Wal-Mart’s responses: The company shut down its meat departments. The corporate think was, obviously, that if no meat cutters are employed, there are no employees to be organized by a union.
The eight-hour day? Thank organized labor. Health insurance? If your employer provides you with health insurance, thank organized labor. How about overtime? Same thing. Overtime was pushed by organized labor. Social Security? I hate to sound like a broken record, but thank labor.
Nowadays, the Bush Administration wants to Wal-Mart every worker in America. How? By limiting workers eligibility for overtime. The number of Americans without health insurance has increased to 45 million and there is no plan from the Bushies for reversing the trend. The prescription drug provisions of the Medicare Bill the president signed last year seem to have been written by the makers of prescription drugs. Go figure.
Social Security is right up there on the conservative target list at the same time more and more companies are cutting back on benefits for retirees. The administration is pushing a plan to privatize some aspects of Social Security. One analyst estimates it would cost the government over $1 trillion to take the first step. Add that trillion to the existing budget debt and now we’re talking serious money.
But it is difficult to get a fix on why all these attacks on worker rights are being undertaken. The middle class buys things, real things, and big things. Good paying middle class jobs are the backbone of the American economy. So when the middle class is Wal-Marted and has no health insurance, no pension plan and works more than eight hour days for barely more than the minimum wage and can barely afford to sop at Wal-Mart, who is going to buy the stuff that keeps the economy sound? We’re talking cars, TVs, appliances, houses. The big stuff. What happens when the middle classed gets squeezed?
Which is what is happening right now. Good paying jobs are being outsourced faster than Elvis sightings are being reported. Most of the jobs being created are low paying jobs with few or no benefits. Some old-line companies are pulling the plug on health insurance benefits provided to retirees. When the Homeland Security Department was created numerous provisions of the federal Civil Service Act that related to workers rights were simply set aside.
It might be worthwhile this weekend to pause for a moment while on the way to a mattress sale and remember the working men and women who are responsible for helping build America’s middle class. Back in the day, people fought hard against big corporate interests who put the dollar and profit first and didn’t care much about workers or worker rights. Yes, believe it or not, companies like that existed even before Wal-Mart came on the scene.
Bob Sanders is a freelance writer and communications consultant. Reach him at [email protected]
