It's Not CEO Day

But maybe it should be, with the way the rich and their congressional lackeys have systematically undone both the workers rights and the middle-class economy fought for by labor unions 80 years ago.

We had to fight for those then, and now we have to fight for them again.

Jim Hightower:

Webster’s dictionary tells us that Labor Day was “set aside for special recognition of working people.”

That's nice, but “set aside” by whom? It certainly wasn’t the Wall Street corporate and political powers that be. They nearly swallowed their cigars when the idea of honoring labor’s importance to America’s economy and social well-being was first proposed in 1882. Rather, this holiday was created by the workers themselves, requiring a 12-year grassroots struggle that finally culminated with an act of Congress in 1894.

The campaign helped coalesce unions into a national movement. And its message of labor's essential role also countered the haughty insistence of the robber barons of that time. The barons insisted they were America's "makers" — the invaluable few whose monopolistic pursuits should be unfettered. For they claimed that they and their corporations were the God-ordained creators of wealth.

Despite their bloated sense of self-importance, notice that the American people do not celebrate a CEO Day.

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Yet on Labor Day 2013, robber barons are again ascendant, declaring that they owe nothing — not even a shared prosperity — to the workers, consumers, taxpayers, and other American people who sustain them. Quite the opposite, they and their political henchmen are blithely shredding America's social contract and again insisting that the corporate elite must be unfettered, unions eliminated, and middle-class jobs Wal-Marted.

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This is no way to run a business, an economy, or a society. Fast-food giants are hugely profitable. (Yum! quaffed down $1.3 billion in profits last year alone.) They are more than able to pay living wages and decent benefits, as many local, independently-owned fast-food businesses do. Deliberately and unnecessarily holding down an entire workforce by funneling rightful wages into the coffers of a few ultra-rich executives and big investors is shameful — and dangerous. After all, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over ... and being kicked.

At last, workers are beginning to kick back. All across the country, broad coalitions of religious leaders, unions, civil rights groups, community supporters, and others are joining thousands of fast-food workers in a rolling series of one-day strikes against particular chains, publicly shaming them for profiting through gross exploitation of employees. As one Baptist church leader said of his presence in these protests, "It's a matter of justice."

Yes — and that's what Labor Day has always been about.