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Transcript: ‘Invisibilizing the Workers Who Actually Do the Work’
This week on CounterSpin: a special episode in celebration of Labor Day. It’s presented by corporate media as most importantly a long weekend, with a parade—or, more seriously, as a holiday fought for by US trade unions to honor American workers. But the holiday has more complex origins.
A national holiday had been a goal of US labor—several states already celebrated—but Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day in the midst of an attack by federal troops on striking Pullman railway workers, leading many to see it as more an attempt to appease workers than to honor them.
It’s fitting that the holiday remind us of the struggles as well as the advances of US workers, who face today some of the same problems as workers in 1894—including distant and disconnected owners, whose self-enriching, anti-worker policies are enabled and, if need be, enforced by government.
We revisit a few illuminating conversations about work and labor—and media coverage—this week on CounterSpin.
Labor Day, this is a day to honor the most oppressed segment of society, namely the laboring-class who by repetitious drudgery hard-labor generate all of society’s wealth. Specifically, the impoverished lower-half of society.
For the selfish upper-half of society hoards all the land and wealth, primarily to keep the laboring-class so demoralized and impoverished that they do not organize a Revolution.
wow, really, now just imagine being exploited like this as a worker and owned as a piece of furniture, with nothing of your own, and not even having an intact family to tie yourself to, can’t marry, have family ties, no wonder descendents seem to feel less connected, and even as free, banished from states, despite amendments making you a citizen, laws against your being educated or taught a skill, with a favorite pasttime of whites blaming of, blaming? I meant lynching blacks for raping(though often the white women consented and rape a sham accusation that was made) white women as perceived by white people, true or not, string em up. and forced into inner cities, I mean hell, then learn that yours and your brothers and sisters labor was what actually built the US into the wealthy country it is, and imagine the many who are outraged when talk of compensation for all that hard work is being considered, if only as a way to bolster the group and raise opportunities. The MOST oppressed is the laboring class? yes I’d say so, and also, being free from white guilt a desire to bring things in closer equities between blacks and whites and Latinas-os .
Talk about demoralised and impoverished, pshaw.
Uh, previous comment as Ray, sorry, I had no idea it’d actually go through and be accepted that time, but once it left I couldn’t get it back, sorry…again.