The origins of Labour Day can be traced back to April 15, 1872, when the Toronto Trades Assembly organized Canada's first significant demonstration for worker's rights. The aim of the demonstration was to release the 24 leaders of the Toronto Typographical Union who were imprisoned for striking to campaign for a nine-hour working day. At this time, trade unions were still illegal and striking was seen as a criminal conspiracy to disrupt trade. In spite of this, the Toronto Trades Assembly was already a significant organization and encouraged workers to form trade unions. In December 1872 a parade was staged in support of the Toronto Typographical Union's strike for a 58-hour work-week. The Toronto Trades Assembly called its 27 unions to demonstrate in support of the Typographical Union.
Americans first celebrated Labor Day Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City. A parade with 10,000 workers marched from City Hall to Union Square. In July of 1882 Peter J. McGuire, the co-founder of the American Federation of Labor was invited to speak in Toronto at a labour festival and was impressed. He organized the first American Labor Day Parade in New York in September 1882.
In the USA, following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the military during the 1894 Pullman Strike, Congress unanimously rushed through legislation that made Labor Day a national holiday; President Grover Cleveland signed it into law a mere six days after the end of the strike. The September date originally chosen because Cleveland was concerned that observance of the latter would be associated with the nascent socialist workers movements that rallied to commemorate the Haymarket Affair on May, 1st, the International Workers' Day.
And the state of play today?
The bank giant Wells Fargo argues that much of the job gains in the past three years have come in the form of lower-paying, part-time jobs. At the same time, those workers are seeing their hours cut back. The bottom 20% accounts for almost 30% of the job growth since 2010. America is going back to work. But more Americans are getting low-paying jobs. The jobs at the upper end of the spectrum aren't growing in as many number, but are seeing more income growth and it contributes greatly to the big gap between the rich and poor.
One of every three workers is now part of the "contingent workforce"—the exact number is conveniently hidden, because "the Labor Department does not regularly collect data about this group." When the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped counting this contingent workforce in 2005, it was already at 30 percent of all workers. They're temps, contract workers, seasonal workers, and warehouse box-fillers for Amazon. They're generally in service, retail, food production and dead-end office jobs: stocking shelves, killing meat animals in a factory, doing telemarketing or data entry, cleaning bathrooms, working security, etc. And they're often deliberately kept from working 40 hours a week, because only then would they be entitled to benefits and legal protections reluctantly granted to full-time employees.
Labor Day is one of the major retail sales weekends. With 70 percent of retail workers kept as part-timers and low-end retail increasingly being a round-the-clock operation, Labor Day is likely to be just another day of labor for the nation's worst-paid not-quite-employees. Retail, along with "customer service representatives" and "fast food preparation," is one of the top five "largest job growth" occupations, according to the Labor Department.
The average life of a coal miner in the USA is only 52.7 years.
Black lung is an awful, debilitating disease that can't be cured. It can be prevented, though, and in response to an increase in black lung cases, the Mine Safety and Health Administration is proposing new rules to prevent it. New regulations would cut the limit on miners' exposure to dust; require miners to wear personal monitors to provide real-time dust readings; and change how companies monitor dust exposure, preventing companies from reducing production, and therefore reducing dust, while they measure.
Corporations can afford safety measures. They choose not to comply and fight regulation because workers' lives are meaningless to a corporation. The coal industry will always blame its problems on anything seeking to prevent it from killing its workers at will. But the market shouldn't be allowed to disable or kill more workers to squeeze the maximum profit.
Nationalism, despair, television indoctrination, drugs and alcohol have all done a very good job of keeping the 80 percent of Americans who are "financially insecure" too worn down and miserable to realize they've got a common enemy. If they ever do figure this out, there will the class war and that worries rich liberals and rich conservatives alike a lot. One of the most brilliant propaganda tools the capitalist class ever came up with for suppressing the righteous rebellion of the working class is the American dream. Everyone believes that they themselves will be the one to make it. They all have tickets to a lottery that is never drawn.
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