Happy AMERICAN Labor Day, all you toilers out there!
The only reason us Yanks celebrate the wage-slavers today is so that we won't have to share May Day with all you commie socialists in the rest of the world. We don't have to party with you folks living in socialist gulags like Canada, Britain, Israel, and Denmark.
The only slogans our workers need are "Hey you! Get back to work!" "You're lucky we don't fire you!" "My way or the highway, slacker!" "Everyone pulls their own weight!"
Our workers have everything anyone could possibly want: God, Prosperity Gospel, Chicago School economics, The American Enterprise Institute, Walmart, Creflo Dollar, and Ayn Rand. What more could they want? So swallow those wage cuts, those reduced benefits, those increased workloads, those longer hours, those layoff notices and suck it up for The Man!
Never mind that May Day as the International Day of Labor was an American creation to commemorate the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886.
Come on all you slackers, gangstas, and hipsters, time to wake up and sing!
Solidarity forever! I've been lovin' your posts of late. As Tony the Tiger would growl, "Grrrrrreat!"
ReplyDeleteShared this post with my Facebook "friends," too.
Thanks, and keep those cards and letters coming in!
ReplyDeleteMay Day used to be the arrival of Spring, tout court.
ReplyDeleteIn the late 19th century everyone went out in the Djurgården park in Stockholm, the Royals in open carriages for the first time of the season...
It was a small gang indeed which assembled at Liljans wood in northern Djurgården, to make speaches and listen to them...
They were continentally inspired (Germany).
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ReplyDeleteProud to say I was a union member all my working life even if it was a white collar union (teachers)
ReplyDeleteProudly union myself (also faculty), and had a hand in organizing a bookstore where I worked; UFCW.
ReplyDeleteMy grandfather was involved in an attempt to organize telegraph workers sometime in the 1920s. Western Union saw to it that he never rose above the level of minor district sales manager in the lifetime he worked for that company.
I remember visiting one of the Vanderbilt mansions in Hyde Park, NY about 15 years ago. Franklin D. Roosevelt played an important role in getting New York State to buy the mansion and open it to the public. A friend I was with suggested that Roosevelt may have had something up his sleeve when he did that. The New Deal was in trouble with a hostile Congress and Supreme Court at the time. He may have wanted the public to see how the Gilded Age plutocrats were living while their employees were toiling away for a dollar a day, 12 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week.
I remember a huge complex of greenhouses that served no other purpose than to provide fresh flowers daily for the house. The house itself looked like a state capitol on the outside and an expensive whorehouse on the inside with at least 2 of everything.
Brad, get lost.
ReplyDeleteYou forgot, "Arbeit macht frei."
ReplyDeleteWhatever did Brad say?
He just wore out his welcome.
ReplyDeleteNot only is there arbeit macht frei, there is also Adam's curse.
Love the song! I am union (teachers' union). It does my heart good to have it remembered!
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