tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3862216000300765627.post3725877207596913138..comments2024-01-16T03:42:46.705-05:00Comments on The Downward Spiral: Why is Labor Day Still a National Holiday?Bill Hickshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17551954408189665078noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3862216000300765627.post-45433921436554412812011-09-05T18:19:47.703-04:002011-09-05T18:19:47.703-04:00@bmerson - sadly, once they won the labor wars, th...@bmerson - sadly, once they won the labor wars, the unions became complacent and more interested in protecting their own perquisites, which often meant climbing into bed with management.Bill Hickshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17551954408189665078noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3862216000300765627.post-20224491253831680282011-09-05T12:16:07.764-04:002011-09-05T12:16:07.764-04:00Maybe we can just re-title it to "Anti-Labor ...Maybe we can just re-title it to "Anti-Labor Day", it has much more context today than the current moniker.MrNiceGuyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15956428291969275973noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3862216000300765627.post-1764760026526590082011-09-05T11:58:07.069-04:002011-09-05T11:58:07.069-04:00You're right of course. The holiday, practica...You're right of course. The holiday, practically speaking, should probably be called something like BBQ Day or Kickoff Day.<br /><br />I think history will probably show that, in addition to the damage done by Republican and Big Business demagoguery, unions did themselves no favors with many of their policy choices. Long after unions had improved working conditions and raised wages to a comfortable living level, they continued to fight a battle that increasingly came to be seen as nothing more than another money grab. Perhaps the grab was justifiable. Perhaps not. Either way, it became an increasingly hard sell, especially in the face of the demagogues.<br /><br />I sometimes wonder whether there are any unions left with the position and stones needed to actually pull off a strike and make it stick. The best bets seem to me to be the Teamsters and the Longshoremen. In both those cases you disrupt the JIT structure of American business, so you don't have to hold out forever to make an impact. Grocery stores would start to get empty inside a week if the strike occurred without warning.<br /><br />How about teachers? Not locally, that never works. But nationally, if all the teachers walked and all the parents had to scramble for childcare. Could that be disruptive enough for long enough to make an impact?<br /><br />Doesn't really matter does it? In any case you can come up with, the result would be to inconvenience American "consumers", and the one thing "consumers" can't abide, especially Americans, is inconvenience. They would be grist for the great Fox demagoguery machine and the unions would get the blame for it all, no matter the worthiness of the cause.<br /><br />Absent fundamental psychological and sociological change among the "consumers", unions are done in this country for the foreseeable future. Sad, really, because it leaves exactly zero groups left to advocate for the bottom 90% in the ongoing class war. This, too, I'm afraid, is long lost.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com