Oh, and there are lots of industrial companies that do not close for holidays. Many businesses that operate on a 24 hour day, 7 days a week, with shifts can’t shut down because it is too costly. Think refineries, chemical plants, glass manufacturers, etc. That’s part of the job. If your shift works on that holiday, normally you would get paid time and a half for working the holiday, and you could take the holiday time off as another vacation day later on.
You are just wrong. From my cite:
Eh? Granted as we discussed above it isn’t usually celebrated as ‘Union Day’ anymore, as unions are largely going the way of the dodo as far as most non-public sector Americans are concerned. But that is precisely why it was created - at the behest of and in celebration of the labor movement. And in the U.S. the labor movement traditionally = unions.
And they are usually union jobs, or at least in industries strongly represented by a union, which was my point that the union guys are the only blue collar workers that get the day off.
Which makes sense, as the unions were the ones that brought it about.
IME, most people don’t focus on the specifics of the holiday - be it Presidents Day, MLK Day, Labor Day, Memorial Day, etc.
They just focus on the BBQ, the day off, sleeping in.
The blue-collar workers in my factory are going to be surprised by your revelations. They got Labor Day off like they do every year and they are not unionized. It is as blue-collar, shift work as it gets and we wouldn’t think of making them work on official holidays.
They get tons of other benefits as well including a very generous retirement plan, cheap health insurance, paid college tuition and floating holidays that they can use as they see fit among many other things including very expensive appreciation gifts for doing a good job.
You don’t have to have a union to be treated well even in the bluest collar of settings. I am not one of the blue-collar workers but I have been forced to take time off even when it caused a major project delay just because my managers know that family comes before work both for themselves and everyone under them. The same idea applies to everyone. The people that work on holidays or other off-schedule times are all volunteers and well-compensated for it.
Edit: responded to wrong post.
I was watching Chicago news yesterday, and there was a segment on a Labor Day parade, in Naperville, i think. They spoke with several attendees, asking how they were enjoying the parade, what brought them out, that type of thing. All of them mentioned they were supporting “the troops" or cops or firefighters. It seemed odd. I don’t think many know what Labor Day actually is, or at least was.
They show off their huge boats.
Yup. Holidays are dumb. But I’ll take the paid day off, thanks.
Which unions? The ones that originated to give workers more power so that wages matched the work being done? The mob controlled unions that put the strong arm on legitimate business men and women? The local union which forces business to hire injured workers for insane wages to do trivial jobs?*
Like everything else in life, unions can be either good or bad.
I built a casino I.T. system. The server room was on the second floor. There was a freight elevator to get large items to the second floor. The elevator had four buttons, 1, 2, open and close. The first day on the job we went to use the elevator and attempted to press a button. A union guy was sitting in a chair with a book. He got all pissed because it was his job to push the buttons. I talked to him about the job, he was an electrician and had one of those nonspecific back problems that the docs could never figure out. So he became an elevator operator. He made about 90,000 a year to push the buttons. Since the elevator was rarely used after the first week or so, he sat and read. It was a giant waste of money but the union had it’s rules.
The same union guys did the low voltage cabling. They used 4 or 5 different naming conventions on the panels. It was a giant mess. We tried to get different electricians in but the union wouldn’t go for it. It took about three years to get that mess cleaned up.
Some if the union guys rocked but the ones that sucked couldn’t be fired so a shitload of work had to be redone. The casino engineering department hated the union guys because they had to clean up ton of work, like none of the electrical work being tied down right. That little problem almost pushed back the opening because the inspection failed. So the non-union casino engineers had to go redo half the work.
Nothing in my experience points to any advantage for using union labor. Unless of course you are a member of a union.
Slee
What do the Dopers who bitch about excessive adulation of the military celebrate on Memorial Day?
Memorial Day is not for celebration. It is a commemoration.
This again:
Standard caveat of me not being a conservative (except here on the 'dope)…but what’s that got to do with celebrating the labor movement? Even if one doesn’t think that unions are necessary today that doesn’t mean that they never were. There was certainly a time in the US and throughout the world where they were VERY necessary and had a tremendous impact.
I doubt most people whether conservative, moderate or liberal or something else really know what Labor Day is actually representing. It’s just a holiday, just like Memorial Day. So, they are celebrating a day off, as others have noted.
So why are either one still holidays if they no longer have any cultural significance? Should government be in the business of mandating days off for no reason?
People like having holidays, and in the US at least we get few enough of them as it is. I think you’d have a riot on your hands if you tried to remove more (as it is, not all businesses honor all federal holidays). The government doesn’t mandate them btw, they just say which days THEY are honoring.
Personally, I think Labor Day is one we should keep, regardless, because I think the labor movement was an important part of US history…and, as everyone works and as much of what the Labor Movement did and achieved impacts people today it’s good to memorialize, even if most people have forgotten why we even have the holiday.
I can’t speak for the rest of them, but sleeping in is always cause for celebration.
They celebrate what they do for every other holiday: The Troops!
This statement could not be more wrong. It is so wrong there no rightness. Amongst wrong statements, there is none more wronger than this.