Labor Day weekend is here once again. And while we can all enjoy the barbeques, the sales, and Bumbershoot, it’s important to remember what this season is all about.
That’s right it’s LABOR Day. So when co-workers, shop clerks, and bank tellers tell me to “have a good weekend” or a “good long weekend” without mentioning labor, I let them know what’s up. When that well intentioned acquaintance wishes me the wrong words, I have no choice to tell them: “It’s Labor day. Labor. Labor. Don’t you celebrate LABOR DAY?”
You see, there’s a war on Labor Day in this country, and make no mistake about it, we are a laboring country. This country was founded by people who labored, and if it was good enough for them, it’s good enough for the rest of us. And you know, most Americans still labor today. The silent majority shouldn’t take it any longer. We need to boldly proclaim LABOR day.
LABOR is America’s wealth creator.
LABOR built it. All of it.
One more day the employer pays people for not doing shit.
Right fucking on.
Bob, you are such a tool.
Every other day, the employer pays people shit for doing things.
@ 5
Pay for work. Work for pay. What a concept.
@6
You missed the operative phrase:
It was commentary on shitty non-union wages in the age of conservatism, dipshit.
This was funny:
Labor Day, a day when management and white collar workers get a day off and actual laborers still have to go to work!
“All that serves labor serves the nation. All that harms is treason. If a man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool. There is no America without labor, and to fleece the one is to rob the other.”
Abraham Lincoln
I tried on two different occasions to get employers to change our holidays from set paid holidays to just giving employees “X” amount of paid days off and let the employees choose which days they wanted to call holidays*. On both occasions the workers thought it was a great idea and management was horrified. Employees choosing their own holidays was a bit “above their station” as it were.
*I was working in a field where you had to have 24/7/365 coverage and letting people choose their holidays would help get some holidays covered and hey, what if you didn’t give a shit about labor day, but did care about your anniversary? Or you were shinto and didn’t mind working on Christmas and Easter, but wanted Koshogatsu off?
“The NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power. And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of million of dollars in dues each year because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them; the union that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees.
This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing drop rate rates, improving teacher quality, and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary these are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, or collective bargaining.
That is simply too high a price to pay.”
NEA General Counsel Bob Chanin
Labor first. Students somewhere down the list of priorities.
“One more day the employer pays people for not doing shit.”
Oh, the horror! A worker gets a day off with pay. What we need is to do is to ditch Labor Day and replace it with Job Creator Day. To celebrate, America’s workers must give a free day of labor to their glorious Job Creators.
@ 14
I wonder how many ‘laborers’, those lauded here as the creators of all that is valuable, use Labor Day for anything other than an extra day to sleep in and then catch the ball game on the tube.
My staff is off, with pay, on Labor Day. I’ll be working.
@12 No different than you would do to all American workers, you’d have teachers to give up due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. And for what, Bob? Not for students. You don’t give a rat’s ass about them. It’s to satiate your greed and selfishness that you would have others sacrifice but refuse to do so yourself. You’d have the workers of America sacrifice everything they’ve fought for but any talk about raising taxes on the very wealthy a few percentage points results in you whining about class warfare.
@ 15
You’re comparing what you allege would be my disregard for my staff with the NEA’s disregard for children?
My staff, should they feel mistreated, are free to work elsewhere and even to file a complaint against me with Employment Security or L&I, among others.
Where do the children go when their teachers strike? Where do the children go for redress when a clearly substandard teacher is kept in the classroom because the union steward was able to out-argue the principal to an arbitrator? Those fucking, greedy students. How dare they?
@ 6
See, thats the issue. You guys don’t believe in actually paying for work. The only “labor” the Conservatives consider legitimate is that of the guy sitting in that teak-paneled office on the 45th floor talking on the phone with his secretary on his lap while she cuts him fat rails on his desk.
Everyone else is just white trash or welfare scum or something. All the machinists, all the welders, all the loaders and mechanics. All the drivers and operators and diggers. They’re all disposable and beneath notice in Capitalists efforts to build another 10,000 square feet onto an 80,000 square foot house that nobody even ever lives in. Or buy that 130 foot motor yacht because the Joneses got a 120 footer and they’re assholes who are always trying to show you up.
It was Labor, not Capital that built this Country. It was Labor that fought all the wars and cut all the meat and sweated blood tilling the land to put fresh food on your table. It was Labor that cut the timber and milled it into usable product for YOU to sell, while refusing to allow the actual workers to share in the profits of their own Labor.
You think that you don’t need Labor anymore, that your Capital will keep you clean and safe and healthy. That all you need to do is trade your Capital around like shoving chips across a roulette table while you snivel and whine about the wear and tear on your shoes from having to walk between tables.
It is us, the laborers of this country that don’t need YOU. And there is a shitload more of us, than there are of you.
“I wonder how many ‘laborers’, those lauded here as the creators of all that is valuable, use Labor Day for anything other than an extra day to sleep in and then catch the ball game on the tube.”
It’s none of your fucking business what people do on their holiday, Bob.
“My staff is off, with pay, on Labor Day.”
So you despise the American worker. We already knew that, Bob.
“Where do the children go when their teachers strike?”
Like you give a fuck about public school students, Bob, especially the brown ones. Get real. All you care about is your damned pocketbook.
I heard Charles Koch plans to buy Labor Day from the government if Romney is elected and rename it Billionaires Day to celebrate the growing concentration of America’s wealth.
“My staff, should they feel mistreated”
You are a Galtian Lord. You have every right to mistreat your staff because they are “inferior” to you.
“We should sink Todd Akin,” Rove laughed. “If he’s found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!”
http://politics.kfyi.com/cc-co.....e=10386499
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Don’t get excited, folks! It’s only a joke. Karl Rove was only telling a joke at a fundraising breakfast. He was merely being funny.
Except everyone knows Rove has no sense of humor, is not a funny man, and has never told a joke in his life.
Well, Akin can hope there’s a first time for everything, but if Rove joked about me like that I’d be checking the brake lines on my car.
@2 Every worker I know would gladly trade places with their employer. Employers get paid for not doing shit every day of the week. They live on the backs of their employees’ labor.
@14 Kornflake Konservative,
“My staff is off” is what you tell every lover you’ve ever been with as you leave them unsatisfied.
Your staff.
@17 Sorry, but I felt compelled to fix this for you.
“It was Galtian Lords, not labor that built this Country.”
Get your inferior mind right, Deathfrogg, and bow down to your superior Galtian Lords.
@ 22
Except everyone knows Rove has no sense of humor, is not a funny man, and has never told a joke in his life.
“As people do better, they start voting like Republicans – unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.”
“Somebody gets to be smart and somebody gets to be dumb. If we win, it’ll be because of the president. And if we lose, it’ll be because of me.”
“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”
Karl Rove as MC Rove
Karl Rove gives a rap performance at the 2007 Radio-TV Correspondent’s dinner alongside comics from the television show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....r_embedded
Jesus H, RR. Are you ever correct about anything?
@ 25
Not so long as we have the 2nd Amendment.
@ 17
Gee, Deathfrogg, I thought the last three years have demonstrated that it’s you that society doesn’t need.
It might have been labor that built this country.
It was my capital, and my personal obligation on the note, that provided the funds to pay the laborers to build the building in which I sit, working on a Friday night of a holiday weekend. It was my capital that paid the laborers to do the remodel going on 10 feet from me, between 7 am and 4 pm. I know what their hours are because I’m here before they get here and I’m here after they leave. Same thing with my staff. I greet them in the morning and I bid them goodnight when they leave in the afternoon.
You’re comparing what you allege would be my disregard for my staff with the NEA’s disregard for children?”
Your disregard and lack of respect for your “staff” has been made quite clear. And what you’re saying here is that teachers have disregard for students until such time that they give up due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. I reckon that, by your reasoning, the machinist has no respect for the lathe or widgit until he sacrifices due process, employee rights and collective bargaining to his Galtian Lords too.
@14
That’s your choice. You could take the day off too.
“It was my capital, and my personal obligation on the note, that provided the funds to pay the laborers to build the building in which I sit, working on a Friday night of a holiday weekend.”
If your staff walked out on you, your business wouldn’t worth be jack shit, Bob. It’s no different than it is for me. I may be one of the best engineers in the country, but without technical and clerical staff, I have no product for my clients. You view your staff with contempt. I view mine with respect. Unlike you, I don’t have to worry about my staff showing up late or leaving early. I know that their work will get done. They never let me down. A large part of the reason why is my treating them with the huge amount of respect they deserve.
So, your work is your entire life, and you have no family that you give a shit about. Your obsession with increasing your own wealth precludes anyone else’s ambitions. You are entirely self-centered.
If someone needs new tires on their car or do a major repair, do you pay them enough to get that done without having to purchase it on credit? If you are paying any of your alleged workers anything less than about 50 thou a year, you are part of the problem. There are other things in life besides work. There are other concerns that do not involve helping you make a profit. There is life to live, kids to raise, broken shit that needs to be repaired.
My old boss worked 365 days a year. On Christmas, on Thanksgiving, every weekend. His kids hated him with an absolute passion. He had a huge house in West Seattle, several nice cars and a very high value chunk of land in the middle of the Sodo industrial district. But you know what? Nobody liked him. people didn’t want to be his friend. People didn’t want to know him personally. He had his cronies at the Lodge, and the people he’d been doing business with for decades. But nobody liked him. He was not a nice person at all.
In Washington State, it takes 83 hours paid at minimum wage, to make the lowest level of rent, the break even point is at least $25 an hour. Thats for everything.
Housing should never be more than an a third of expenses. Do you pay people enough to live in anything but a small apartment? Own a car? Buy decent food to eat? To handle an emergency without having to go bankrupt? I doubt it.
I could give a damn about your Capital. Without it, you are nothing.
Yep, it’s a two-way street. We both need each other. Most of us in the working class get that. It seems most folks in the capital class have forgotten that.
The workers on the other hand could go get another job making the same wage they made before.
@ 30
I have a business that cannot take a day off. My choice was to not deny my staff a holiday so that I could take it off.
@26 When does he start being funny?
@28 Even if what you say is true, you didn’t build that. The laborers built it.
Speaking of capital, the capitalists who run the stock market gave me another $1300 today for not doing shit. I hate to rub it in, but I’m what they glorify. Oh and one more thing, I don’t have to sign notes to get capital; I own my capital.
@33 I don’t need Bob for anything.
On the other hand, if Bob gets an implacable urge to suck a rabbit ****, he can’t do without me.
Hmmm, the server won’t let me post the word “dick.” I get a “Forbidden” message.
Hmmm, I guess it’s the other word that won’t post. Are we suddenly cleaning up the language on this blog?
suck
I’m being jerked around by a computer.
It seems Romney didn’t exactly catch fire.
“The crescendo of the speech was surreal, abrupt and unsatisfying. Traditional nomination speeches end with a memorable optimistic line repeated for effect …. This speech’s closing call and response was a series of questions that ended with the crowd shouting ‘No!’ It was a metaphor as well as an ill-advised rhetorical device.”
” … criticism of President Obama substituted for actual proposed policies ….”
“A recently retired Marine e-mailed, ‘he’s banking on Americans having total amnesia about 2001-2009, including failed wars and a multiple increase of the national debt.'”
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/31/.....index.html
“He should get the president’s record right and understand there have been 18 tax cuts for small businesses and that there have been less regulations on businesses these past three years than in the first term of President George W. Bush’s administration.”
“The one hour allotted by the networks for the acceptance speech is one of the most precious in all of politics. It is the one opportunity a political party and its presidential candidate have to engage in an uninterrupted conversation with the American people. To orchestrate it so badly …”
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/31/.....?hpt=hp_t2
the last few posts are prime examples of why deathfrogg cant rub two nickels together currently.
Dude, you are so absolutely clueless about economics that its scary – it shows with where you are, and the whome “gimme free stuff” meme that the left is trying to sell(or should I say steal).
you seem to think people just owe you something, or that every job out there should pay enough for someone to own a new house and a new car. Well it doesnt work that way – never has, and hopefully, never will.
so go ahead, keep blaming everyone else(like those evil republicans_ for your lot in life – and keep thinking people owe you something – and let me know how that turns out for you. I for one, dont owe you jack shit.