(COMMON DREAMS)
By Keri Leigh Merritt
As Labor Day approached this year, I awaited the lip service of Republicans praising “job creators” and business owners. I knew full well there was no chance they’d honor the common laborer—the people who feed, house, and transport them; the workers who keep their cities clean and their towns sanitary; the men and women who have raised their children and taken care of their aging and dying parents.
I didn’t have to wait long to be proven right. Long devoid of any meaning to most American laborers, the holiday now serves as little more than a day for our current politicians to shamelessly adulate their donors—while people in the service industry are forced to work longer hours.
Yet as disheartening as the desecration of Labor Day is, the policies of the current administration are worse.
As Noam Scheiber recently wrote at The New York Times, amidst all the loud, sensationalist stories, the current administration quietly has worked to dismantle the few rights and protections the common American laborer once had. The Trump White House has “proposed a 40 percent cut for the government agency that conducts research into workplace hazards, undone Obama-era guidances on enforcement of employment laws and sought to eliminate a roughly $10.5 million program that helps some unions and nonprofit organizations … to educate workers on how to avoid injury and illness.”
This assault on worker’s rights is only the beginning.
