This Labor Day, the usual suspects eloquently appeared - or predictably disappeared. Harris urged, "Thank unions!" Biden said, "Union workers built this economy - that's just a fact." Walz righteously retorted to critics saying he's "in the pocket of organized labor" with, "I am the pocket." And the other guy went missing/golfing. "The scab is the natural-born foe of labor," said the great Eugene Debs decades ago, "a mass of moral putrescence." Still true, that.
In their first joint rally, Harris and Biden illustrated why Dems hold a 15-point electoral lead among union voters when they spoke before a large, jubilant union crowd in Pennsylvania. "The facts are clear - Democrats are the party of labor," said Harris. "One path leads to a brighter, more inclusive future for all workers, a future where economic, gender, and racial justice go hand in hand. The other path seeks to turn back the clock, dismantling the progress we've made and putting corporate interests ahead of working families...We cannot go back." "Are you ready to make Donald Trump again?” a smiling Biden asked, prompting cheers. "We’ll always walk alongside you."
In "remarkable contrast," Trump was nowhere to be seen in what was deemed "a real unforced error. If you want to stand with labor, you show up on Labor Day, right? That's kinda the mission." He did, though, make his toxic, slothful presence known online, offering up the dubious optics of "sitting like (old) Richie Rich at (his) golf club in Palm Beach, ringing his bell for Diet Coke." "Happy Labor Day to all of our American Workers who represent the Shining Example of Hard Work and Ingenuity," he blathered. "Under Comrade Kamala Harris, all Americans are suffering during this Holiday weekend," he said on a day Americans set a record for one of the busiest travel days in history.
In his first solo appearance, Tim Walz also spoke - in affable person! - before thousands of raucous workers in the powerful, 1.4 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. A longtime member of two public-sector teachers' unions whom he's thanked for helping make Minnesota "one of the best states for workers in the nation," he told the crowd "with as much passion as a Minnesotan can muster," that "AFSCME stands for all that’s right." During his speech, he succinctly eviscerated his rich-guy opponents and outlined what working people want - collective bargaining, fair wages, health care, safe conditions, "to be treated fairly with dignity."
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Among labor leaders speaking up for the Democratic ticket, one of the most vociferous has been UAW President Shawn Fain, who at last month's DNC famously stripped off his jacket, Hulk-Hogan-style, to display a "Trump Is A Scab" t-shirt now ubiquitous among union workers. "That’s not just my opinion. That’s a fact," Fain says. "All we have to do is look at the track record - when (Trump) was president, corporate America ran wild." He cites the facts: Auto plants closed: "Trump did nothing." He told workers in Ohio he'd bring all the auto jobs back: "Trump did nothing." In 2019, GM workers went on strike for a better life: "And Trump did nothing." The audience roared, "Trump’s a scab! Trump’s a scab!"
"It becomes our duty at this writing to discuss the “scab," wrote Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926), firebrand, Socialist, trade unionist, anti-war activist, founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) and five-time Socialist candidate for president in a livid 1888 harangue against the "moral leper" opposing workers' efforts to "advance (from) servitude to independence." The scab "sinks to the level of a loathsome reptile: he becomes a walking breathing stench, as destitute of soul as a dungeon toad," "unclean through and through, so vulgar and beastly in his instincts he is as destitute of all sense of obligation, of what is due to others, as a hungry hog with its snout in a swill tub...To call him a dog would be an insult to the whole canine race."
A founder of the American Railway Union and child of a progressive mid-west that saw Milwaukee run by three Socialist mayors who instituted public works projects known as "sewer socialism," Debs did time in prison for sedition after a 1918 speech in Ohio that decried a bloody imperial World War run by "lap dogs for the billionaire class, who only serve themselves." Mostly, at a time of rampant industrialization, he spoke for workers in mines and factories victimized by the rush for profits. Joining nationwide strikes of tent colonies and marchers declaring "We Are One" and "Why Can't They Breathe?", Debs tirelessly touted Socialism as “the mightiest movement in the history of mankind."
Its greatest enemy, along with captains of industry, were scabs, those loathsome "mysteries of creation" who come to steal the jobs of "honest workingmen (fighting) against oppression and injustice...ready to do their duty for such considerations as their masters may offer." Like certain insects and reptiles with no reason to exist, scabs "curse the earth, air and water...repulsive, pestiferous and poisonous...The scab is a filthy wretch." Oh, that Debs were still with us to hear The Scabby Orange One burble to his creepy fascist bestie, "You're the greatest cutter...I mean, they go on strike, and you say, 'That's okay, you're all gone.'" Moral putrescence, thy name is. Billy Bragg reminds us what to do.
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