They Died for Your Rights
I'm not quite in the frame of mind to go back to work tomorrow after the luxury of a long weekend of sleeping past the alarm. A few hours ago, I was watching fireworks after a ball game, accompanied by the usual mélange of patriotic music, or what passes for it (love Bruce's "Born in the U.S.A." but have the people who use this for every national holiday fireworks display really not clued in to the irony? it's not as if it's subtle) and the usual message about troops dying to preserve our freedoms.
But on Labor Day it seems more appropriate to remember some other men and women, those not in uniform, who fought and in many cases died for our rights: our rights to a limited work week--to have this weekend, or any weekend, off--and rights to a minimum wage, to negotiate our pay and work in safe conditions, to have recourse if we are treated unfairly or work in unnecessarily hazardous circumstances, to name a few. It's not so terribly long ago that asking for a raise in pay or an improvement in harmful working conditions might be met with a counteroffer in the form of a few hired thugs with clubs. And yet many men and women stood up, and when they fell others stood up in their place, to earn the workplace rights most of us take for granted.
Unions have lost their good name, perhaps because the largest ones have become, as giant organizations so often do, more focused on the interests of the organization and its management than on the needs of the people they exist to represent and serve. As a result, unions have lost their potency as a genuine force for progressive change, which is a sad thing for the working stiff but also is a poor legacy for those early union organizers--factory workers, sweatshop laborers, new immigrants--who faced intimidation and violence in the name of making a better life for themselves and for their heirs.
Their heirs: that would be us. This holiday would be a good time to remember the people who gave us Labor Day and much more.
But on Labor Day it seems more appropriate to remember some other men and women, those not in uniform, who fought and in many cases died for our rights: our rights to a limited work week--to have this weekend, or any weekend, off--and rights to a minimum wage, to negotiate our pay and work in safe conditions, to have recourse if we are treated unfairly or work in unnecessarily hazardous circumstances, to name a few. It's not so terribly long ago that asking for a raise in pay or an improvement in harmful working conditions might be met with a counteroffer in the form of a few hired thugs with clubs. And yet many men and women stood up, and when they fell others stood up in their place, to earn the workplace rights most of us take for granted.
Unions have lost their good name, perhaps because the largest ones have become, as giant organizations so often do, more focused on the interests of the organization and its management than on the needs of the people they exist to represent and serve. As a result, unions have lost their potency as a genuine force for progressive change, which is a sad thing for the working stiff but also is a poor legacy for those early union organizers--factory workers, sweatshop laborers, new immigrants--who faced intimidation and violence in the name of making a better life for themselves and for their heirs.
Their heirs: that would be us. This holiday would be a good time to remember the people who gave us Labor Day and much more.
posted by Maines at 1:11 AM
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