Theodore's World

I loved the music of Johnny Cash and June Carter. They both passed away just weeks apart apart about ten years ago.

Labor Day should be a time to reflect positively on labor itself; the goodness and noble work of all labor from the lowest least scholarly educated skilled labor to the highest educated most highly trained disciplines of skilled labor and how the collaborative efforts of individual labor brings about our prosperity and wealth within a free society.

These are some beautiful pictures from Life Magazine's web site in well deserved praise and positive recognition of labor and the American worker:

http://www.life.com/gallery/48141/in-praise-of-the-american-worker#index/0

Labor Day is not Labor Union Day. Labor itself should not be equated with labor unions and their collective bargaining agreements and in the forthcoming conservative ascendency, we conservatives should expand on and help redefine this to be true.

With negative self destruction, our modern day labor unions have degenerated and are so disparate from the historic positive contributions of their origins a century ago with productive higher standards for better working conditions and the excellent apprentice, journeyman, master vocational education systems applied to all trades.

We have all witnessed the sad and deplorable thug behavior this past year in the Wisconsin State Capitol: the menagerie of incessant chants, drum beating, damage to property, insulting in your face chants of "shame, shame, shame, shame" in the halls of the Wisconsin State Senate that went on for weeks by these people, adults mind you, manifesting such infantile behavior with this huge false sense of entitlement, all the while being paid not to work.

It is no wonder Americans watching this spectacle are so dismayed and labor union membership itself continues to decline so readily within such a misled collectivist union environment to the point now of unions' near irrelevancy in our modern American work life with now less than 15% of American labor belonging to a union.

Significantly, those 15 million American union workers are no longer the traditionally thought of private sector blue collar factory workers with manufacturing jobs and shop stewards, but most of those 15 million are today comprise overpaid public sector government administration and bureaucrats with unsustainable far too often obscene lifetime benefits, not underpaid policemen and teachers which number today so fewer in these ranks.

"Tens of millions of Americans working in the private sector—including many belonging to labor unions—know from first-hand experience that the terms and conditions of future employment can be changed. That is how real life works, and a government job should not confer immunity from real life.

FDR was right. Collective bargaining has no place in the public sector. It inevitably leads to abuse. Favoritism, undue influence, lack of transparency, manipulation of government policy, the relentless mulcting of the taxpayer—this is the poisoned fruit of turning government agencies into union shops. It goes without saying that public employees ought to be as free as anyone else to join professional associations and affinity organizations. They are certainly entitled to all the protections of the civil rights laws and of a reasonable civil service system. But labor unions should have no right of exclusive representation in any government workplace and no right to negotiate wages and benefits with public officials who crave their votes and political support.

Public-sector collective bargaining has been a mistake—a mistake whose ruinous, expensive, and corrupting effects are climaxing in the onrushing public-pension tsunami. There is no easy way to undo that mistake. But as the gathering crisis makes vividly clear, there are many good reasons to try."

-so writes conservative commentator Jeff Jacoby from Boston.

He writes well in this article "What public-sector unions have wrought". You will be astonished at the abuses in this long but very good and informative read:

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/8035/what-public-sector-unions-have-wrought

Happy Labor Day to you Wild Thing and all who share here.