Taking it back: Labor Day? Make that Right to Work Day!

I’m as big as fan as the next guy of having a nationally-recognized 3-day weekend, suitable for grilling, lake or back yard fellowship, traveling, or taking on big home-improvement projects. Celebratory or honor-related 3-day weekends are especially great, even if primarily we do that celebrating and honoring in the above-mentioned ways. I love Independence Day (and I never call it “July 4”), because the signing of the Declaration of Independence signified a new way, a new beginning, a new form of government. I love Christmas, because it celebrates the birth of our Lord (even if in all likelihood He was born in March or April, and for that matter almost certainly 5-6 BC). I love Memorial Day as an opportunity to honor fallen Patriots in all wars.

Labor Day? Not so much. I’ll take the day off and enjoy the extra activities. But I’ll dress up like a big hairy woman in fishnet hose, and go hang out in a a biker bar before I’ll celebrate communism and the American labor monster.

Labor Day began as a union appeasement sop

Labor unions in New York had begun observing Labor Day in 1878, on the first Monday in September. In June of 1894, labor unions, led by perrenial Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene Debs, conducted a nationwide strike (accompanied by arson and violence) against the Pullman Palace Car Company, that virtually shut down all railroad traffic west of Chicago. Interestingly, many Black Americans crossed the picket line, certain that the racism rampant in the American Railway Union, when things were eventually settled, would leave Blacks cut out of yet another labor market. As strikebreakers and as Black Americans, they paid a particularly high price in violence at the hands of the union.

The strike was ultimately broken when President Grover Cleveland called in the US Marshalls and 12,000 Army troops, on the grounds of the threat to public safety, and interference with the delivery of the US Mail. The strike was ended, but labor unions responded with wholesale arson and violence. Remind you of anybody you know? Like SEIU, the Purple People Beaters? The union-paid thugs inciting riots in Wisconsin when their gravy train was getting derailed?

Driven by fear of even more widespread nationwide backlash from unions, and with dangerous organized labor forces rising in Europe, Democrat President Cleveland and the Congress moved swiftly to establish Labor Day as a national holiday. The legislation was passed and signed within 6 days of the end of the strike. They flirted with the idea of setting the date as May 1 – by then a well-known union celebration. However, due to the connotations of violence associated with the “Haymarket Affair”, they opted for the first Monday in September, which was not only coming up soon on the calendar, but was somewhat widely accepted by unions anyway.

So began the annual federal observance of Labor Day, which along with May 1 (aka, May Day, aka International Worker’s Day) make perfect Commie bookends for the American summer.A sop to labor unions in order to pour water on the prospects of a nationwide wave of union violence in the summer of 1894, 117 years ago.

Unions then and now

Then, as now, unions were closely aligned with both organized crime and with Socialists/Communists. That translates to unions being in direct opposition to free markets and political freedom. Which in turn, translates to being anti-American, through and through. At that time they achieved their anti-freedom ends through violence, electoral cheating, and intimidation. In the modern era, they still do all of that, but in addition have penetrated the government bureaucracies at the federal, state, and local levels so thoroughly that they can preface each of those methods with the words “legally sanctioned”. Government employee unions, with the help of the union-stacked Labor Department and NLRB, have far outpaced the reach that private-sector unions ever hoped to.

We’re done appeasing. Now we just steal it.

I’m no longer interested in settling for life on the terms of the Left. What was once called the Mainstream Media, we have a number of terms for. My favorite ( of so many good ones) comes from Rush: the Democrat Party House Organ. I no longer respond, even negatively, to the cries of RACIST!!!!! for both imaginary offenses and for when the Democrats want to distract from their hands being caught in the cookie jar. Capital punishment is in fact necessary to an orderly society. The demand that only American citizens (alive, and only once) are allowed to vote is not cruel, but is in fact kind and just. barack is a dull-witted poseur who could not even run the day shift of a fast-food restaurant. Paul Krugman is not only wrong, but stupid. Democrats are not only wrong, but by and large are evil.

So, no more Left-driven terms. I accept that the first Monday in September is a paid holiday and gives us a nice, timely 3-day weekend to share with family, friends, or our beloved power tools. And I declare it the first annual….

I don’t acknowledge unions as having any right to my honor. I neither serve nor bow to Communists, collectivists, socialists, anarchists, criminals, and dim-witted thugs. Quite the contrary. I celebrate the joy and prosperity, in Texas particularly, of not having a state shackled by government-enforced union muscle. I celebrate the freedom of people to work where they are qualified to work, and the freedom of businesses to hire and fire whom they will, for their own business reasons. I long that that freedom to esist in all 50 states, plus DC and territories.

Spread the word

This year, 2011, is the first of many. Start now, tell your friends and family, blog it (without attribution if you wish). We are taking America back, one piece at a time.