Music whilst reading about and enjoying your Labor Day! https://play.spotify.com/user/usdeptoflabor/playlist/4GL4LFTTcsHXSrfwKXD2ZV

Today is Labor Day.  We honor the labor movement and especially thank our unions and their members for the battles they have fought to ensure we have a livable wage, decent standard of living, a safe work environment, among a multitude of other progressive values.  Happy Labor Day!Ah who am I kidding, myself and millions of others around this country are working on a day that is meant to appreciate labor-the middle and working class.  It’s amazing the hack job that is being done on unions and the progressive labor movement in general the past few decades.  People are working longer hours for lower wages, working a few jobs, working weekends, working holidays, basically slaving away to the machine to meet their daily needs.  Without the strong presence of unions, the wealthy elites invoke illegal laws and partake in inhumane practices such as taking away holiday pay, not paying overtime, penalties for joining unions, cutting safety measures, threatening employees, illegally dumping hazardous material, polluting our air, water, environment, killing wildlife and biodiversity.  Find out many more of the human rights, worker rights, and environmental violations at laborrights.org.
The proof is in the pudding, and you’ll find some pudding below, I encourage you to checkout each link for more articles, graphs, and intellectual thought.

See the correlation?  Union membership goes up, wealthy elites take a pay cut.  Union membership goes down, wealthy elites get more of the pie.
http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Underpaid and overworked!
http://www.epi.org/publication/raising-americas-pay/

Do CEOs really do 373 times more work than you?
http://www.aflcio.org/Corporate-Watch/Paywatch-2015
Checkout more graphs at http://inequality.org/

A visual appealing virtual graph courtesy of http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-economic-inequality/

Now you may be wondering how did all of this happen?  Much is to blame.  Big factors are the hack job being done on unions and labor, deregulation, tax evasion, subsidies, bad trade deals, and that America is an oligarchic capitalistic country with a broken democracy that favors the Military Industrial Complex, the fossil fuel industry, and short term gains over long term sustainable progress.

But what can we do?
More to come, will finish after, I seriously need to go to bed, and then get to my job, because we can’t all live off of government cheese and corporate bailouts.

As promised here is some pudding.


Sorry that’s the Healthy Butterscotch Mousse Pudding (high protein, vegan) for the 1%ers.

Here’s the sugary, fattening, 2% of the hourly minimum wage snack for the poor blokes.