Monday is Labor Day. It will be treated like any regular day, here at RNS, because I have to work. However, I will hopefully have a moderately important announcement that day.
Some of the inmates at the dKos Animal Farm and Petting Zoo, however, are treating the day as one of the holiest of holies.
They’ve even decided that the history of May Day and the labor movement will be changed in it’s honor.
May Day was officially founded in 1886, during a Chicago strike for the eight-hour workday. In 1889, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) delegate to the International Labor Congress in Paris proposed May 1 as international Labor Day. Workers were to march for an eight-hour day, democracy and the right of workers to organize. Delegates approved the request and chose May 1, 1890, as a day of demonstrations in favor of the eight-hour day.
The history I learned about the May 1st holiday and the Labor Movement (which were given the same amounts of classtime as the Civil War in my history classes and I considered a waste of book space) is confirmed by Wikipedia
The term May Day can refer to any of several traditional secular, Christian, or Pagan holidays celebrated either on 1 May itself or another day at the beginning of May and having as a common element the commemoration of the height of spring or the coming of summer.
The 1 May date is used because in 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, inspired by labor’s 1872 success in Canada, demanded an eight-hour workday in the United States to come in effect as of May 1, 1886. This resulted in a general strike and the riot in Chicago of 1886, but eventually also in the official sanction of the eight-hour workday.
In 1889, the first congress of the Second International called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago riot. These were so successful that May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International’s second congress in 1891. The May Day Riots of 1894 and May Day Riots of 1919 occurred subsequently.
So the dKos diarrheaist, Tula Connell, is anywhere from 2 to 14 years off in one direction or 4 to 5 years off in the other.
But her version was good enough for a recommend to front page exposure by the aristocracy at the dKos.
How quaint.
Speaking of unions, here is an example of why I just cannot stand them.
An Ontario councillor who lowered the town flag to half-mast after the death of an Edmonton-based soldier in Afghanistan has found himself under fire from Canada’s largest union.
The reason? The exclusive right to raise and lower the flag in Scugog Township is supposedly written into Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 1785-01’s collective agreement. That resulted in the union launching a grievance procedure.
They apparently have so little to do that they can file a “loss of pay grievance” for someone doing their duty to remember a national hero.
Found at Right Thinking
Life must be very good up there for the union to have to dig that deep to have something to file a grievance over.