Labor Day doesn’t just signal the end of summer and the start of football season. It’s also a national holiday that celebrates the achievements of American workers. Organized labor’s been demonized a lot lately, and we want to shed some positive light on the same groups that have fought for fair wages and a reasonable work week.
We found a great article from Amy Traub at the Drum Major Institute worth sharing. Traub defends public workers and explains that by demonizing them, we hurt the middle class. Here’s the start, click on Read More below to read the entire blog.
The nation’s middle class is under attack. The recession hit private businesses and public budgets hard, but Americans’ ability to attain or hold onto a middle-class standard of living may be the ultimate victim. We’re losing jobs, losing services we depend on, losing pay and benefits. Yet instead of working to build up the middle class, a growing chorus of pundits insists that dragging down city and state workers across the country is the answer to our economic woes. Democratic mayors and governors fall for this ploy at their peril: it threatens the nation’s economic recovery, and feeds into conservatives’ anti-government, anti-worker agenda.