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Today is Labor Day in the US. It is the day that was chosen (American Exceptionalism in operation) by the US so that it could be different from the traditional Labor Day celebrated in many other parts of the world.
Big ef’fin’ woop.
When you see politicians today speechifyin’ on how much Labor means to them, how much they owe to seein’ their papa and mama going off at 0′dark thirty and not gettin’ home ’til half past midnight, and how much they support all their hard working constituents, remember these few things.
The official unemployment rate in the United States on this Labor Day 2009 is 9.7%. Then you start to add in the "discouraged workers" and then you have those that are underemployed (that 20 hour a week job at the Quik-Mart paying minimum wage probably fits here), then the numbers start getting well up into double digits. I’m not up to going through all the various google searches, but let’s put a guess that the total of Unemployed, Discouraged Workers, and Under-employed is near 20%. One in five workers is most likely in these 3 worker categories.
One in five.
Have a good Labor Day, y’all.
And because I can:
5 Comments
Thank you for posting about Labor Day.
Robert Kuttner wrote a terrific book a couple of years ago about the Squandering of America,and the info was prescient.
Joe Palermo wrote a piece about Kuttner’s book entitled”Republican Class Warfare”.
This is the second Labor Day that I go back and reread it.
Perhaps you will choose to read it,too.
Joseph A. Palermo: Republican “Class Warfare”Jan 23, 2008 … With the current economic meltdown millions of Americans might be starting to wake up to the new reality brought on by years of unbridled …
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/……..82904.html – Cached – Similar
Total 10 Year Job Gains: Negative 203k
Thank goodness for the Unions and the people who do the work. They deserve better than they are getting.
Nobody notices that the people in Congress on both sides always talk of businesses small and large but hardly ever about workers. They have been convince by business, that business runs everything and the workers are just an expense to business. That’s why they think it’s great for Companies to get cheap labor by illegals, offshoring, and manufacturing in other countries, to sell the stuff here. They have long ago sold out the American worker, but those American workers keep voting them back in, and looking to them to save them. If anyone thinks our Government is going to do anything to save this Country, they may as well be putting a gun to their heads and pulling bthe trigger.
Thanks for the spirit of this.