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Health & Fitness

This Labor Day ....

Today I had the pleasure and honor of marching in Naperville’s wonderful Last Fling Parade with representatives of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Wheatland Democrats and U.S. Representative Bill Foster, among others.

This Labor Day, let’s thank organized labor for all that it has brought us. Things like the 8-hour workday; weekends; paid sick, holiday and vacation days; child labor laws; workplace safety and many other benefits. Most Americans probably take these things for granted, and are perhaps not even aware of organized labor’s role in bringing them to pass. The efforts of organized labor have benefitted all working Americans, union member or not.

But today, many of America’s workers have been shut out of these benefits, and many of the Nation’s workers do not make enough to share in the American Dream. Middle- and working-class wages and salaries have been flat or falling for decades. When adjusted for inflation, today’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is 23% lower than it was when I graduated from high school in 1968. In the 1950s and 1960s worker earnings and worker productivity tracked almost perfectly, but since the early 1970s productivity has increased roughly 80% while wages have increased about 4%. Where are the benefits of that increased productivity going? Consider that corporate profits are at an all-time high and that with the growing wealth gap in the U.S. the top 20% of Americans now control 84% of Nation’s wealth while the bottom 20% owns 0.1%. These facts coincide with the decline in union membership over roughly the same period, and reveal not a nation of growing opportunity, but of growing inequality.

We need to restore the place of the American worker in our Nation. It is not an abstract corporation that builds your car, repairs your street, wires your house or waits on you in the restaurant. It is the worker, and their labor should bring them a living wage, those union-born rights and protections we once believed that we would be able to take for granted, our respect and our thanks.

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