Grand Avenue by Mike Thompson for August 31, 2014
Transcript:
Labor Day is a wonderful holiday! It's the day we put aside each year to honor mom's who suffered through the pain of labor while delivering babies. Thanks for explaining. Explaining the origins of Labor Day? No, explaining the need for Labor Day to be immediately followed by the start of school.
swr: You sound like those nostalgic for slavery. Back then, union membership was a crime, that’s why so many of the early were called “Brotherhood of …”, disguised as fraternal organizations. Many of the earliest assembly line type jobs employed those of a same former nationality, who would pool their pennies to hire a reader to break the monotony of repetitive work – and the works read were socialist, but being in the workers’ native language, the bosses never caught on.Even independent farmers were joining together in the Farmers National Alliance, with their own newspapers and traveling lecturers – and brought about the People’s Party (populists) in the US, and similar movements world-wide (today called the Green Party in 83 countries). Lawrence Goodwin said, “The average dirt farmer had a better knowledge of how money really works, than a graduate student in economics does today.”