Fly your flag for labor today: Labor Day 2009

September 7, 2009

Labor Day, 2009

Fly your U.S. flag today. This is one of the dates designated in law as a permanent date for flag flying.

Miners and their children celebrate Labor Day, Littleton, Colorado, 1940 - Library of CongressMiners and their children celebrate Labor Day, Littleton, Colorado, 1940 – Library of Congress

Here are some past posts on labor, and Labor Day:

History-minded people may want to look at the history of the holiday, such as the history told at the Department of Labor’s website.

The First Labor Day

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Or this history at the more academic Library of Congress site:

On September 5, 1882, some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City to participate in America’s first Labor Day parade. After marching from City Hall to Union Square, the workers and their families gathered in Reservoir Park for a picnic, concert, and speeches. This first Labor Day celebration was initiated by Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and labor union leader who a year earlier cofounded the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a precursor of the American Federation of Labor.

McGuire had proposed his idea for a holiday honoring American workers at a labor meeting in early 1882. New York’s Central Labor Union quickly approved his proposal and began planning events for the second Tuesday in September. McGuire had suggested a September date in order to provide a break during the long stretch between Independence Day and Thanksgiving. While the first Labor Day was held on a Tuesday, the holiday was soon moved to the first Monday in September, the date we continue to honor.

American Memories at the Library of Congress has several photos of Labor Day celebrations in Colorado, in the mining country.

What do the unions say?  Among other parts of history, the AFL-CIO site has a biography of Walter Reuther, the legendary organizer of automobile factory workers — September 1 is the anniversary of Reuther’s birthday (he died in an airplane crash on the way to a union training site, May 10, 1970).

We’re glad to have the day off.  Working people made this nation, and this world, what it is today.  We should honor them every day — take a few minutes today, give honor to workers.  Tomorrow, it’s back to work.

Resources:

Below the fold:  Statistics about working Americans, from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Urge others to fly their flags for working people, too:

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5 Comments | Current History, Education, Flag etiquette, Fly your flag today, History, Labor and unions, Politics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Congratulations, graduates! You got hired! (Want to think about joining the union?)

May 25, 2009

No more comment necessary.

Tip of the old scrub brush to  . . . ramblings of the last American jedi . . .

1 Comment | Business, Business Ethics, Economics, Government, History, Labor and unions, unions | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Dad the Mechanic, vs. Joe the Plumber

October 22, 2008

Ms. Cornelius at A Shrewdness of Apes nails things down again. Tip of the old scrub brush, with extra bubbles, to JD2718.

My father tended to vote Republican, too.  For the first nine years of my life he remained a small business owner, in Burley, Idaho.  When the workers at J. R. Simplot went out on strike one November (1961 as I recall, but I was a child), it doomed several furniture stores in and around Cassia County, and my parents’ was just one.  For the rest of my life my father worked for other people, until he retired.

Still he voted Republican.  He even had a union card, from the old plumbers and pipefitters union in Los Angeles, from when he worked on Liberty Ships during World War II.  I never could figure it.

I do recall the stern lecture I got when I went to the Democrats’ mass meeting my first election, and then when I got elected as a delegate for McGovern and — the only one in my town, as I recall — I put up the McGovern bumpersticker (McGovern finished third in parts of Utah County, behind the American Party candidate).  My father told me that no one in the family had ever voted Democratic before.

It was a great comic scene, somthing right out of Woody Allen.  My father lecturing me about how voting Republican was rather a family duty, with my mother behind him shaking her head “no,” and mouthing “Don’t believe him.  Not true.  No.”

The only president I ever smuggled him in to see was Jimmy Carter.  Carter showed up in Salt Lake City, and spoke in the Latter-day Saints’ Tabernacle on Temple Square, as I recall.  I wangled the tickets, got Dad there and sat with him.  Better than Christmas.  Almost as good as when we watched Henry Mancini from nearly the same seats.

I don’t really know how my father would vote in this election, though.  He was nervous about the civil rights campaigns, about Martin Luther King, Jr.  He’d tell the stories about why he had problems with unions, about how the unions kept him from promoting African Americans he’d hire at United Cigar Stores in Los Angeles (before the Liberty Ship gig).  And he’d say that he wouldn’t have any problem voting for a black man who had a history of accomplishment in areas outside of civil rights, too.   He said he could vote for a black man from Harvard, someone who had the educational background of Kennedy, though he voted for Nixon against Kennedy (and Nixon twice more). Barack Obama might be the guy my father would have voted for.

Life sometimes imitates Thomas Kuhn’s observations about scientific revolutions.  Sometimes the children have to go vote the interests of the parents, especially when the parents don’t, or won’t.

My father voted against Lyndon Johnson, too — twice.  Johnson’s reforms of Social Security, designed to keep American senior citizens out of the county poor houses, kept my father out of poverty after he finally retired (at 75?  77?).  The Republican businessmen he’d put his faith in managed to squander the pension funds he might have had, or cheat him out of the share of the business that would have kept him from having to rely on Social Security.  My father put his faith in Republicans, but Lyndon Johnson rescued him.

I don’t know this “Joe the plumber.”  I knew my father, the former plumber and pipefitter, the erstwhile small business owner, the man who worked from the time he was 14 to help his family get enough education to get out of poverty, first his sisters in college, then his own family.  He never made enough to benefit from tax cuts for the rich.  My father was real, and deserved better.

Go read Mrs. Cornelius’s story.

1 Comment | Barack Obama, Campaigns, Family, History, Labor and unions, Politics, unions | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Honor working Americans, fly your flag today

September 1, 2008

Labor Day, 2008 — in addition to honoring America’s working people, especially unionized working people, Labor Day is the traditional start of the presidential campaign in presidential election years.

What if we applied the false start rules the Olympics uses to presidential campaigns?

Fly your U.S. flag today. This is one of the dates designated in law as a permanent date for flag flying.

Miners and their children celebrate Labor Day, Littleton, Colorado, 1940 - Library of Congress

Miners and their children celebrate Labor Day, Littleton, Colorado, 1940 - Library of Congress

Here are some past posts on labor, and Labor Day:

History-minded people may want to look at the history of the holiday, such as the history told at the Department of Labor’s website.

The First Labor Day

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Or this history at the more academic Library of Congress site:

On September 5, 1882, some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City to participate in America’s first Labor Day parade. After marching from City Hall to Union Square, the workers and their families gathered in Reservoir Park for a picnic, concert, and speeches. This first Labor Day celebration was initiated by Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and labor union leader who a year earlier cofounded the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a precursor of the American Federation of Labor.

McGuire had proposed his idea for a holiday honoring American workers at a labor meeting in early 1882. New York’s Central Labor Union quickly approved his proposal and began planning events for the second Tuesday in September. McGuire had suggested a September date in order to provide a break during the long stretch between Independence Day and Thanksgiving. While the first Labor Day was held on a Tuesday, the holiday was soon moved to the first Monday in September, the date we continue to honor.

American Memories at the Library of Congress has several photos of Labor Day celebrations in Colorado, in the mining country.

What do the unions say?  Among other parts of history, the AFL-CIO site has a biography of Walter Reuther, the legendary organizer of automobile factory workers — September 1 is the anniversary of Reuther’s birthday (he died in an airplane crash on the way to a union training site, May 10, 1970).

We’re off to a barbecue-style picnic at the in-laws.  Kenny is down from the University of Texas at Dallas, James still hasn’t begun classes at Lawrence University (which is too far to come from for dinner, anyway).  Family usually gets precedence in this house, so we miss the IBEW, UAW, and other union picnics we get invited to here.

We’re glad to have the day off.  Working people made this nation, and this world, what it is today.  We should honor them every day — take a few minutes today, give honor to workers.  Tomorrow, it’s back to work.

Resources:

Leave a Comment » | Biography, Flag etiquette, Fly your flag today, Labor and unions, Technology, unions | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

There once was a Union Maid

October 8, 2007

Labor Day blew away too quickly. We didn’t honor labor as we should have — nor do we ever, in my estimation. Summer, especially in a teacher’s life, is a parenthetical expression between two holidays that fail to honor the designated honorees, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Perhaps that is fitting and proper, but of what, I do not know.

Nor do I wish to live where such dishonoring is proper, or fits.

The United Auto Workers called a strike against General Motors, but a contract agreement arrived in just a couple of days. Today UAW announced a strike deadline for Chrysler, in their “pattern” bargaining, whereby the union strikes a deal with one of the Big 3, then takes that as the starting point for negotiations with the others, who usually have to keep up with the Sloans, Fords, Chryslers and Ketterings (used to be a Romney in there, remember, not to mention Kaiser and Packard and Willys).

NPR’s interviews at the GM strike featured one autoworker who remembered the last GM strike, when 400,000 workers left the assembly lines to man the picket lines. This time? He said he realized the stakes when they announced 74,000 workers would strike. What happened to the other 326,000 people? Gone to competition, mechanization, globalization, and general political wind changes.

Mrs. Cornelius wrote at A Shrewdness of Apes about the labor dream, the union dream, that some of us still remember (not enough of us). I won’t say the dream is shattered. It is not a dream shared by as many people any more.

When you read her essay, note a key part of it, a piece of almost every story about a working, union family in the U.S.: Mrs. Cornelius was the first in her family to graduate from college. Once upon a time a good, basic union job offered the opportunity to raise a family, buy a house to make a home, and send the kids to school and to college, in the hope and expectation that the children would have a better life than the parents as a result of those educational opportunities.

That shared belief is gone. America suffers for its loss.

I wonder whether there is a correlation between the loss of those two shared value planks that once formed the platform of our national morality, the respect for unions and the hope that hard work would help the next generation, and the understanding that educational opportunities would and should be available.

When did we lose those dreams? I first became aware when I left the Senate Labor Committee; while we generally had a few sourpusses complaining about education as a monolithic institution at every education policy hearing, they were vastly in the minority, and their views were not views that generally pushed discussion. Touring the nation with the President‘s Commission on Americans Outdoors (PCAO), we kept running into people who, though not rich by any standards, had adopted the turtle-with-head-in-shell stance of the hereditary rich and other nobles, resisting change in an effort to cling to what property and privilege they had. It was in Lamar Alexander’s Tennessee that fellow driving a decade-old car phrased it succinctly: “I didn’t graduate high school, and I get along pretty well. I don’t want my kids learning stuff they don’t need.” (Lamar was chairman of PCAO.)

Then a few months later, after I moved to the U.S. Department of Education, at a speech talking about changing the ERIC Library System to increase accessibility especially for parents, the usually-angry-at-ED cluster of teachers afterward had a guy who said, “You just don’t get it — the parents don’t care. The parents don’t want their kids to get a good education if it means they can read books and see movies the parents don’t approve of.”

Pete Seeger segués Woody Guthrie’s story of the “Union Maid” into the chorus, “You can’t scare me: I’m stickin’ to the union/I’m stickin’ to the union . . . ’til the day I die.”

When did that become, “I’ve got mine, get your own?” When did the hope of Woody Guthrie give way to the experienced, cynical blues of Billie Holiday?

When did we move from communities that made schools a first priority, as in the Northwest Ordinances of 1785-1789, as in the first things pioneers did once they settled west of the Mississippi, as in the creation of the Land Grant Colleges, to communities where plucking out the bricks of the foundation of education is acceptable government policy? Utah’s pioneers prided themselves on establishing schools as a first order of business once they got to the Salt Lake Valley, in 1847. This year the Utah legislature, no longer dominated by the kids of those pioneers, voted to start unraveling that system despite it’s being a model in many ways, and successful by almost any measure, by using vouchers to take money from public schools.

And how do we make those not sticking to the union, nor sticking to any communities of shared values that emphasize building for the future, get back to the hope that we can make a better future, if we work together?

Announcements for Nobel winners started today (it’s October, after all). I’ll wager, again, that most Nobel winners will be American, and that most of the winners will be products of America’s public schools. How long can we keep that up, if we don’t dream it any more?

Mrs. Cornelius said:

There is no such thing as a job Americans won’t do. There is such a thing as a job Americans can’t afford to do on the salary offered.

God bless the working man and woman. They deserve much more than a day off from work. They deserve our respect. They are the backbone of our country.

People are so scared they won’t stick to the union, to any union. That’s not because the unions are too powerful, certainly, or it would be the other way around.

Now, excuse me, but I have to go listen to Taylor Mali again.

8 Comments | Economics, Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, History, Labor and unions | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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