GOP Labor Day tradition: Attack Labor
Every Labor Day, a holiday created by the labor movement to honor workers and highlight the need for labor reform laws, anti-union politicians pretend to support the rights of American workers with generalized platitudes about the economy and jobs.
This year, Republican state Senate candidate JP Marzullo went even further and chose the holiday as a day to attack labor unions and declare “true Right to Work the meaning of Labor Day:”
Labor unions are controversial, and with good reason. Many of them have been run as criminal enterprises, with deep connections to organized crime; many operate in a blatantly coercive and undemocratic fashion. Union demands and strong-arm tactics, while providing security and good wages to members, have crippled some American industries, and limited jobs as well.
Publicity for Unions come when one tries to protect a member who should be punished, (i.e. when the baseball players’ union fights suspensions for player insubordination, domestic violence or even drug use) or when school districts are afraid to fire incompetent teachers because of union power, or when the members of public unions protest cutbacks in benefits that their private sector counterparts would be grateful for. It is true that today’s unions often embody longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer’s observation that “Every great cause begins as a movement, degenerates into a business and ends up as a racket.”
The unionists who died fighting for our economic rights deserve better, writes Salon’s David Sirota:
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.”