A Late Labor Day

Late on the calendar this year.

At this point in our history: very late for any sort of break for American workers.

September 1942: Detroit, Michigan

Elderly women workers carrying banners in the Labor Day parade.
Photographer: Arthur S. Siegel
Library of Congress FSA/OWI Archive

These marchers may not have been as uniformly "elderly" as the OWI caption put it, but I'd say they were quite alike in feeling they were part of a social sphere with mutual interests.

With such quaint appeals as—

HOUSEWIVES! Ask for UNION LABEL GOODS

EQUALITY... END JIM CROW

—well, in the context of today's formerly working class finding its friends in Rush and Fox, it seems these women were not just elders, but lived in ancient times.

Labor Day 2011, Detroit: President Obama to speak before a union audience.

As this is in the context of Obama's supposed "big jobs speech," to come later this week, I'm afraid I'm with Matt Taibi, here—

... the people he's surrounded himself with are not labor people, but stooges from Wall Street. Barack Obama has as his chief of staff a former top-ranking executive from one of the most grossly corrupt mega-companies on earth, JP Morgan Chase. He sees Bill Daley in his own office every day, yet when it comes time to talk abut labor issues, he has to go out and make selected visits twice a year or whatever to the Richard Trumkas of the world.

There's the sad expectation that Obama will be making proposals to the extreme right of Dwight Eisenhower—who once wrote—

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

But that's ancient history, too: 1954, when the views Ike criticized were those of a Republican fringe to be shunned. It would take a few decades for that fringe to invest enough money and effort to turn their program into the new bi-partisan "centrism"...

This year happens to be the tenth anniversary of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and the author notes how much worse things are now.

There's enough truth in this, that it hurts when I laugh—

BEIJING (The Borowitz Report) – Labor Day, one of America's most beloved and longest-celebrated holidays, has been officially moved to China, U.S. officials confirmed today.

...

The transfer of Labor Day to China represents the first time in American history that an entire holiday has been outsourced, experts said.

"It may be just as well," said the University of Minnesota's Davis Logsdon, who has lectured extensively on Labor Day traditions. "It's been getting harder and harder for Americans to remember what labor is."