Work and work and work and work.
• Enjoy the annual celebration of the fruits of the labor movement -- the 40-hour week may be dead, unions are being crushed even in Harlan County, but at least they can't make your six-year-old work at the mill -- at least not till Scott Walker takes the oath of office, whereupon the NLRB will be packed with little Megan McArdles ("Look at this moocher," Courtney Knapp will say of a plea from a woman impoverished by corporate wage theft, "she owns a tablet!") and the Koch Brothers will criss-cross the country throwing workers into threshers and conveyor belts, just for the pleasure of knowing they won't get Workers Comp. For the moment, conservative PR shops are using Labor Day as an opportunity to pimp right-to-work legislation. Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (doesn't that sound public-servicey? You see their homey little collection boxes next to cash registers wherever union-busters buy their axe-handles) is especially busy: At the Pensacola News-Journal, his rat face appears with the headline "It’s ‘Labor’ Day, Not ‘Union Day,'" reminding us that those pushy strikers in the early 20th century merely slowed the arrival of workplace improvements the bosses were planning to give us all along, maybe as a surprise gift on Christmas 2000. Mix also appears in a guest column at Penn State's Daily Collegian, where he actually leads with this:
As you watch your children board the school bus for the first day back to classes, consider this: that school bus driver is likely forced to pay fees to a union as a condition of driving that bus.And that driver probably thinks he deserves a so-called "living wage" for his money! Better the school district should have the freedom to hire non-union employee Rummy Tom to drive your kids -- he's a little shaky behind the wheel, but he'll work all day for a bottle of rotgut! Makes you wonder when this Gilded Age revivalism will also lead to a revival of sash weight bombs.
