Every Labor Day I hear the same claptrap coming from progressives leftists who try to reinvigorate the failing ponzi scheme that is organized labor. It’s not so much that they try to do such as it is that they have no idea what they are talking about and propagate lies in order to support their position.
One thing you’ll see online in social media circles come Labor Day is the ubiquitous labor meme that goes something like this:
If you like weekends, a 40hr work week and a living wage…thank a union.
That right there is grade A bull crap. The leftists who spout this garbage are like the weaselly kids in school who don’t actually do anything on the group project but then take all the credit for it once it is handed into the teacher.
Here’s the quick history lesson for Labor Day. It was not unions that started any of the things I had mentioned a few lines ago. It was automobile pioneer, master of the assembly line and captain of industry Henry Ford who created all those notions that unions and their mouthpieces want to take credit for.
You see, back in the day Henry Ford wanted to attract skilled workers from his competition to build his cars.
He went about doing this by more than doubling the wages of those workers from $2.34 to $5 an hour in 1914. This was decades before the minimum wage scheme came into effect. Ford didn’t need the government to tell him how much to pay workers. If he wanted the best he paid for the best. Ford also instituted the 5 day work week for his plants and offices in 1926.
While the left would paint all capitalists as parasitic vampires sucking the lifeblood from the workers in some sort of exploitation the truth was that Henry Ford was a man of the people.
Henry Ford said of the decision for the 5 day work week:
“It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.”
At Ford’s own admission, however, the five-day workweek was also instituted in order to increase productivity: Though workers’ time on the job had decreased, they were expected to expend more effort while they were there. Manufacturers all over the country, and the world, soon followed Ford’s lead, and the Monday-to-Friday workweek became standard practice.
So it wasn’t the unions that basically reinvented the way we work and gave the worker more money, more time off and a shorter work week. It was capitalists who saw the benefit in it and through a symbiotic relationship the fortunes of both worker and company increased.
Somewhere along the line though the union drank too much of it’s own kool aid. The results of which can be seen in Detroit Michigan where the auto unions basically destroyed the city. Or in Schenectady, NY where General Electric was based out of for decades until petulant and petty union demands forced the majority of the business elsewhere effectively gutting the city.
From one worker back in the late 1980’s when asked why he was on strike:
“We haven’t been on strike in a while, we need to remind them whose in charge”
Well, when 25,000 jobs leave because of your petty strike…you tell me whose in charge.
Again, you want to thank someone this Labor Day for having a job that doesn’t work you 6 days a week for 80 hrs, thank capitalism, thank captains of industry, thank Henry Ford.
If you want to thank someone for being fired from McDonalds because it’s cheaper to have a machine do your job than pay you $15/hr…thank the progressive left.
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