Greeting's !! 2010

Day's Til Labor Day, 2010

September 6th, 2010

Is a holiday honoring working men and women.
It is observed on the first Monday in September.

Jesus said, "Come unto me, all ye that labour
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest"
~Matthew 11:28~

ALWAYS FINISH

If a task is once begun,
Never leave it till it's done.
Be the labor great or small,
Do it well or not at all.

A Poem & A Few Midi"s

History

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The observance of Labor Day began over 100 years
ago. Conceived by America's labor unions as a
testament to their cause, the legislation
sanctioning the holiday was shepherded through
Congress amid labor unrest and signed by President
Grover Cleveland as a reluctant elction-year
compromise. Read about the turbulent
circumstances of Labor Day's birth, browse
NewsHour segments on labor and the economy, and
explore labor-related resources on the Internet.

The fable of American history's hardest-working
man is told inThe Ballad of John Henry.

THE ORIGINS OF LABOR DAY

Pullman, Illinois was a company town, founded in
1880 by George Pullman, president of the railroad
sleeping car company. Pullman designed and built
the town to stand as a utopian workers' community
insulated from the moral (and political) seductions
of nearby Chicago.

The town was strictly, almost feudally, organized:
row houses for the assembly and craft workers;
modest Victorians for the managers; and a
luxurious hotel where Pullman himself lived and
where visiting customers, suppliers, and salesman
would lodge while in town.

Its residents all worked for the Pullman company,
their paychecks drawn from Pullman bank, and their
rent, set by Pullman, deducted automatically from
their weekly paychecks. The town, and the company,
operated smoothly and sucessfully for more than a
decade.

But in 1893, the Pullman company was caught in the
nationwide economic depression. Orders for railroad
sleeping cars declined, and George Pullman was
forced to lay off hundreds of employees. Those who
remained endured wage cuts, even while rents in
Pullman remained consistent. Take-home paychecks
plummeted.

And so the employees walked out, demanding lower
rents and higher pay. The American Railway Union,
led by a young Eugene V. Debs, came to the cause
of the striking workers, and railroad workers
across the nation boycotted trains carrying
Pullman cars.Rioting, pillaging, and burning of
railroad cars soon ensued; mobs of non-union
workers joined in.

The strike instantly became a national issue.
President Grover Cleveland, faced with nervous
railroad executives and interrupted mail trains,
declared the strike a federal crime and deployed
12,000 troops to break the strike. Violence
erupted, and two men were killed when U.S. deputy
marshals fired on protesters in Kensington, near
Chicago, but the strike was doomed.

On August 3, 1894, the strike was declared over.
Debs went to prison, his ARU was disbanded, and
Pullman employees henceforth signed a pledge that
they would never again unionize. Aside from the
already existing American Federation of Labor and
the various railroad brotherhoods, industrial
workers' unions were effectively stamped out and
remained so until the Great Depression.

It was not the last time Debs would find himself
behind bars, either. Campaigning from his jail
cell, Debs would later win almost a million votes
for the Socialist ticket in the 1920 presidential
race.

In an attempt to appease the nation's workers,
Labor Day is born

The movement for a national Labor Day had been
growing for some time. In September 1892, union
workers in New York City took an unpaid day off
and marched around Union Square in support of the
holiday. But now, protests against President
Cleveland's harsh methods made the appeasement of
the nation's workers a top political priority. In
the immediate wake of the strike, legislation was
rushed unanimously through both houses of Congress,
and the bill arrived on President Cleveland's desk
just six days after his troops had broken the
Pullman strike.

1894 was an election year. President Cleveland
seized the chance at conciliation, and Labor Day
was born. He was not reelected.

In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American
Federation of Labor, called it "the day for which
the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when
their rights and their wrongs would be
discussed...that the workers of our day may not
only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday,
but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching
phalanx and feel the stronger for it."

Labor Day: a goodbye to summer
Almost a century since Gompers spoke those words,
though, Labor Day is seen as the last long
weekend of summer rather than a day for political
organizing. In 1995, less than 15 percent of
American workers belonged to unions, down from a
high in the 1950's of nearly 50 percent, though
nearly all have benefited from the victories of
the Labor movement.

And everyone who can takes a vacation on the first
Monday of September. Friends and familes gather,
and clog the highways, and the picnic grounds,
and their own backyards -- and bid farewll to
summer.

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING

Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it
should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank
or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work,
or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat,
the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the
hatter singing as he stands,
The woodcutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way
in the morning, or at noon intermission or at
sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the
young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or
washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to
none else,
The day what belongs to the day-at night the party
of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious
songs.