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Celebrate Labor Day By Really Standing Up For Labor

By A D Hemming

02 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org

This September people in the USA will will celebrate Labor Day which
is set aside to honor working people and the bettering of their
working conditions as well as the union organizing to do this with such
celebrations taking the form of barbecues, picnics, parades,
et al.

Many countries such as Mexico, Britain, Sweden, Italy, and other
West European countries celebrate Labor Day on the first day of
May.

Due to the insane Cold War hysteria about the “terrible Communists”
and the “10 feet tall Russians” created by a hard core Nazi spy
network on the US Government payroll, given special
security clearance, and a key role in making government policy
in 1945 for the USA as this reveals. This supreme act of disloyalty
to the USA then in turn led to May Day being called “loyalty day"
in supreme act of the worst irony. It didn’t help matters that as
Der Spiegel, a German publication explains “70% of” the “information’
the US Government got on the Russian bear in early and crucial
years of the Cold War came from this Nazi spy network whose
head was wanted for the worst war crimes of the war.

Those taken in by the Cold War hysteria would do well to see
this revealing how flawed that was and put to music celebrating
East meeting West to defeat the greatest enemy of working people
and of unions ever anywhere, the Third Reich.

Much of the struggle to get decent working conditions and pay for
employees got a big boost in the 1880s with the blood of working
people fighting for the rights as they had to with the constabulary
acting as hired guns for big business and especially in the police
riot of Haymarket and the cold blooded attack on working people
seeking to get better conditions and otherwise get better lives for
themselves and their families. Real family values! Those family
values of the labor movement are still worth fighting for— something
to remember this Labor Day.

A name stands out among all, Parsons. Albert and Lucy Parsons
were committed as a white Confederate veteran and his wife
(black based on the fact that she was believed to have been
a slave and living with another slave before meeting Albert)
to the cause of bettering the lives of all working people and
calling themselves by turns “Socialist, Communist, and Anarchist.”
saying they were all three.

Whitewashed from the official US history, Lucy Parsons was
quite the rabble rouser, the agitator, and really an all American
woman of that time and actually likely of all US history. But
then the FBI really was averse to such “subversives” as
he surely would have been toward those such as Thomas Jefferson,
Thomas Paine, and many of the founding fathers of the US
republic.

Both of the Parsons couple did much for the working people
of the USA, but here we’ll concentrate more on Lucy Parsons.
Though both were deleted from US history textbooks in
secondary schools and universities, it was Lucy whom the
“economic royalists” as Franklin D Roosevelt called
them so feared saying she “was more dangerous than
a thousand rioters.” It was quite an “honor” that she
should be so feared these upscale rip off, slave driving
scum and parasites off the US working people.

This provides more and substantial details about Lucy Parsons
and her contribution to the Labor movement which like all
worthwhile movements has been in the tradition of and
zeitgeist of the revolution which created the USA as has
every other movement to better the lives of people here
such as the anti slavery revolution, the women’s suffrage
movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s
liberation movement as well as others.

Labor Day in the USA became official in 1894 when Grover
Cleveland, then the president signed legislation congress
passed making the first Monday in September Labor Day.

What started out in the USA actually of celebrate Labor Day in
May with congress passing legislation to do this in 1888 was to
adopt an eight hour day. This is one of things which is celebrated
on Labor Day with many other achievements for working people.

The struggle to set aside a special day to honor wage earners and
their movement to better their working conditions ended up with
a holiday in September. The struggle after the US Civil War started
with a national meeting of the National Labor Union which came
into being in Baltimore in 1866 began to push for an eight hour
labor day. In 1868 congress adopted this for some employees
of the US Government or that connected with the federal government.

But not until 1888 congress pass legislation for this applying to the
wage earners generally. This excluded some and all agricultural
employees.

The big force perhaps behind this was the Knights of Labor started
in 1869 in Philadelphia. It committed to bring together all wage
earners in the USA whether those with special skills or not, “foreign
born” and native born, black and white, men and women “to secure
to the toilers a proper share of the wealth that they create; more of
the leisure that rightfully belongs to them. Furthermore they created
cooperative businesses which would allow wage earners through
this to save more of their income and keep more for these
cooperatives.

But every step of the way in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s the
presidents, the states, and the courts sided overwhelmingly with
big business which was perfectly willing to go for the old quid
in the quid pro quo with the big business parasites getting the
quid as they could buy these officials and labor couldn’t while
leaving the pro quo for labor. With courts in their corner along
the congress for the most part the big companies could get the
laws interpreted by the courts to suit them as well as prevent
legislation from passing congress which would substantially
alter the power balance between the wage earners and these
big companies. Thus for the most part even with great agitation
and organization in this period the big business parasites tended
to prevail. Those who created “the wealth' as the British Labor
Party would put it in the 20th Century would fail to “share
in the fruits of their labor” in the USA of this time.

It would be the 1930s which bring in substantial reform with
Franklin D Roosevelt and his New Deal. The “economic
royalists” would face some important defeats during that
period, but it would take the blood and often lives of those
backing the wage earners.

Let us celebrate this Labor Day with the names of Lucy
and Albert Parsons as well as FDR on our minds. This and
the bloody struggle to bring a better balance between labor
and business which now no longer exists and to commit
ourselves to revive that movement of which all should be
proud as real Americans as this right here should illustrate,
for this is the zeitgeist the USA needs today for a “people
century” Henry Wallace called for as vice president.

AD Hemming, who has been an activist for progressive causes since the early 1960s, has
been a researcher, poet, journalist, historian and got his feet wet as a progressive in the
civil rights movement in US South as a teenager and who identifies as black and
provides a perspective of a person of color from the US South.

*A D Hemming is pseudonym used by this writer on a regular basis.


 




 

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