David Sirota’s Timely Reminder about the Meaning of Labor Day — When You Forget Your Own History, You Have No Idea How Far You Have Fallen

© 2013 Peter Free

 

02 September 2013

 

 

Labor Day’s original meaning is lost — the holiday serves only as an indicator of how much the United States has become a meekly accepted oligarchy

 

David Sirota aptly said today:

 

 

Labor Day was not designed to be cast as an apolitical holiday that everyone should pretend they honor because they simply support the apolitical notion of work.

 

The “labor” in Labor Day refers not to generic “work” but to organized labor — as in unions. That makes it a deeply political occasion celebrating the ideas of worker solidarity against corporate power and organizing for collective economic rights.

 

It is a day, in other words, to honor what even President Ronald Reagan recognized: namely, that “the right to belong to a free trade union” is “one of the most elemental human rights” and that “where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.”

 

© 2013 David Sirota, How Labor Day was hijacked: 5 reminders of the day’s real purpose, Salon (02 September 2013) (paragraph split)

 

He had four more thoughts of equivalent insight.  His essay is worth reading.

 

 

Organized labor’s decline has big implications

 

Union labor is what made America a place where economic achievement, no matter who you were, was possible.

 

Labor’s decline, often (wrongly) heralded to have been inevitable due to globalization, coincides with the swiftly growing economic inequality that is noticeably more pronounced in the United States, than it is parts of formerly monarchical Europe.

 

The fact that virtually no one today resolutely stands with the Labor Movement — including the plutocrat-owned and intensely hypocritical Democratic Party — indicates just how easily manipulative economic interests brainwash an ignorant and often unthinking population.

 

 

The moral? — When we forget who and where we were, we have no way of measuring how far we have fallen and why

 

Few Americans recognize that one of America’s most influential economic and egalitarian progressives was Republican.  President Teddy Roosevelt would not recognize what his party has become.

 

Ignorance does not make bliss.  Thoughtlessness cannot wisely guide.