Monday, September 01, 2014

Labor Day 2014

Happy Labor Day! I've featured Billy Bragg before, but via Blue Gal, here's his rendition of another classic:

Here's Robert Reich from last year, about celebrating labor on Labor Day:

Digby has clips of Barbara Kopple and her Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County U.S.A. (I met Kopple years ago, and she's a cool person in addition to being a great documentary filmmaker.)

Digby also passes on "The True Story Of How One Man Shut Down American Commerce To Avoid Paying His Workers A Fair Wage" by Ian Millhiser and "Anti-Labor Day" by Ed Kilgore.

ThinkProgress also offers "Conservatives Protest Labor Day by Staging a Work-In" and Daily Kos Labor gives a reminder of what unions do.

At the Campaign for America's Future, Dave Johnson provides "Why Fight For Unions? So We Can Fight An Economy Rigged Against Us."

At Pharyngula, PZ Myers has posted Sarah Palin's incoherent Labor Day video (Pailn tries to portray herself as pro-labor but opposed to union leadership, and drops entire words in addition to her "g"s. The comment thread is fun, though.)

Erik Loomis' series, This Day in Labor History, is well worth a look.

The PBS series American Masters recenty aired an episode on Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange, and Yale's site, Photogrammar, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, is "a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI)."

At Balloon Juice, Anne Laurie and Kay have good posts for the day.

My most in-depth post for Labor Day was this 2011 post.

If you wrote a post celebrating the day, feel free to link it in the comments.

2 comments:

  1. Just wanna say that by having a union at my workplace 13 years ago, I was protected from losing my job over a bad incident and was able to relocate to another position where I demonstrated I was still a good employee. Without that protection, I would have lost my job and it would have hurt my chances finding another one.

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  2. Good story. Occasionally I meet someone who's virulently anti-union, and it's always because he or she is repeating some BS absorbed from somewhere else and knows little history. The idea that unions are corrupt, but owners and management somehow aren't? The idea that owners and managers will somehow treat everyone better with fewer checks on their power? It's all appalling and harmful.

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