Monday, September 1, 2014

The Annual Labor Daze Post

No Labor Day would be complete without an annual example of conservatives missing the entire point of the holiday, and who had to sacrifice for it: union workers and the people who bled for them, only to be casually destroyed by global conglomerates.

According to the Seattle Times, business backed conservative think tank the Freedom Foundation plans to protest the national holiday by refusing to take Monday off and having a “work-in” all day instead.

“I can’t think of a problem in society that can’t be traced in some way back to the abuses of organized labor, so it would be hypocritical of us to take a day off on its behalf,” said the Freedom Foundation’s CEO Tom McCabe.

Times columnist Danny Westneat pointed out that if McCabe really wants to protest union-led reforms in the workplace, then he should work every Saturday, as well.

“What’s odd about it, though,” Westneat wrote, “is that only 12 percent of American workers even belong to unions anymore. Yet we — I say ‘we’ because I’m in that 12 percent — somehow retain an almost supernatural mind-meld authority over the oppressed and hapless other 88 percent.”

Freedom Foundation materials call public labor unions a “disease” that is “running rampant” in Washington state.

Sure.  The real problem are the people that think workers should be empowered to stand up to their employers, that they should have rights and the ability to bargain as a group when real wages have been stagnant for nearly 40 years while corporate profits have tripled in the last 14 years.

But go ahead and tell yourself the problem is "greedy unions" while you wonder why you can't afford to send your kids to college.

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