The Labor Movement’s Saddest Song

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/57358/the-labor-movement-s-saddest-song

The Labor Movement’s Saddest Song
Worker's Rights
by Jaime O'Neill | August 4, 2014 - 9:24am

Another Labor Day is on the horizon, and we can be sure that there mostly won’t be much attention paid to the men and women the observance was meant to honor. There are always a few obligatory boilerplate editorials dotted in local papers from coast to coast, and a few desultory parades, but beyond that, the reason for the Labor Day holiday gets lost in another bleary and beery extended weekend. Not coincidentally, more non-union workers each year spend that weekend working, without overtime pay, benefits, or holiday pay.

Though U.S. worker productivity has increased over the past three decades, their pay has either stagnated or, in the lowest wage brackets, declined. To add insult to injury, the holiday often prompts no small amount of anti-labor rhetoric. Last year, for instance, there was a piece by a corporate factotum who blogged in a NationalReview.com piece, defining Labor Day as a “crypto-communist” celebration. “Labor is no longer a class,” he wrote. “It’s a racket.” Then, in the long tradition of right wing bomb throwers, he added: “the main problem of the poor in the United States is not that they are worked too hard, but that they do not work at all.”

The writer’s name is Kevin D. Williamson, and he was preaching that nonsense to the right wing choir that sings from an old anti-labor hymn book. But his ulterior motive, no doubt, was to annoy anyone who might be harboring quaint notions about the dignity of working people, and the struggles of the poor. Mission accomplished: He pissed me off. Could his middle initial stand for “Dickish”?

I recently bought a compilation album of old country songs, mostly from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and I was struck by the storytelling power of so many songs on that three CD set. None of those great songs, however, struck me with quite the force of “16 Tons,” a song by Merle Travis first released in 1947. Tennessee Ernie Ford had a big hit when he covered it in the early ‘50s, but the original Merle Travis version is much more tonally consistent with the anger registered in the lyrics. For those who never heard it, the song tells the tale of all those coal miners who spent their lives underground, quite literally scratching out a living, paid in script they could only spend at stores owned by the mining companies that charged them prices that kept them perpetually in debt to their employers. It was a kind of indentured servitude that ground the life out of most of them at very early ages. They died of black lung, and they died of exhaustion, and they died of Vitamin D deprivation. And they died broke for all their hard labor, expended to make a handful of mine owners richer than kings.

[Brickbat]

1. I would argue about the saddest labor song.

Woody Guthrie's "1913 Massacre" breaks my heart every time.