More on labor injustice

I've spent a good few hours today observing Labor Day by surfing the web on economic justice issues. And a few minutes ago I found a website called Jobs with Justice. Here's part of their Labor Day message:

Unfortunately, this Labor Day workers have little to celebrate. Wages and salaries now make up the smallest share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since the government began tracking it in 1947. Meanwhile, corporate profits have risen to their highest share of the GDP since the 1960s. The median hourly wage has declined by 2 percent since 2003, even though productivity has been rising, so workers are doing more work and making less money. The buying power of the minimum wage is at a 50-year low. A record 46.6 million people in the U.S. have no health insurance, and a majority of the uninsured are working people. A recent poll found that "The public thinks that workers were better off a generation ago than they are now on every key dimension of worker life — be it wages, benefits, retirement plans, on-the-job stress, the loyalty they are shown by employers or the need to regularly upgrade work skills."

Think that sounds fair? Neither do we. If you believe America's workers deserve better, take a moment to commemorate Labor Day with a contribution to Jobs with Justice's efforts to put human needs ahead of corporate greed.

The Bush Administration, always ready to help out their super-rich CEO friends, has made it no secret that they are interested in stripping workers of their rights. The Bush-appointed NLRB has stripped the right to form unions from graduate research assistants, disabled employees, and temp agency employees. They've allowed employers to ban off-duty fraternization among employees, allowed employers to retaliate against workers who seek community support for their organizing campaigns, and much more. Under President Bush, the Department of Labor reclassified broad swaths of workers, denying them the ability to receive overtime pay. President Bush has also fought to strip hundreds of thousands of Federal employees of their right to join a union. Now, Bush's NLRB is preparing to let employers strip up to 8 million more workers from their right to belong to a union by manipulating job descriptions to artificially classify workers as "supervisors" ineligible for union contract protection.

How on earth can it be legal to for an employer to ban off-duty fraternization among employees? Whatever happened to freedom of assembly?

I fear it's actually going to take a revolution for matters to get much better and that will be hard to make happen given the current level of Big Brother at play in our society. I do think we're headed for a very ugly dystopia.