09/02/14

Permalink Organized Labor in America Today

Stephen Lendman Labor Day once had meaning. Workers had reason to celebrate hard won rights. No longer. More on this below. The day is commemorated on the first Monday of September. It's been so since 1882. In June 1894, it became a federal holiday. It was when workers had few rights. Management controlled things. Labor was systematically exploited. It took many years of organizing, taking to the streets, going on strike, boycotting management, battling police and National Guard forces, and paying with blood and lives to win rights. They included an eight-hour day, a living wage, employer-paid benefits, and passage of the 1935 landmark Wagner Act. It established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It guaranteed labor the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management. It did so for the first time. Erosion followed. War on working Americans decimated organized labor. Hard won rights were lost. [Image © David Dees]

Paul Craig Roberts The labor unions provided the Democratic Party with a financial base in labor that served as a countervailing power to the Republican base in manufacturing and finance. Whether it was a plot or unintended consequence, jobs offshoring wrecked the industrial and manufacturing unions and destroyed the Democrats’ independent financial base. The two-party system that had maintained a reasonable balance was transformed into a one-party system in which both parties were dependent on the same monied interests and thus answered to the same masters. The consequence was the demise of the middle class and rise of the One Percent. Today the US has the most unequally distributed income and wealth of all developed economies and one of the worst in the entire world. Few Americans other than the One Percent have a stake in the American economic and political system. The imbalance in the distribution of income and wealth cannot be corrected through the tax system. Globalism is a scheme for impoverishing First World labor and taking power and influence from the hands of the many and putting them in the hands of the few. The champions of globalism are the champions of America’s destruction.

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