Tom Suozzi

Labor Day and the American Dream

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The American Dream isn’t as mystical as people may think. It’s a simple concept: If you’re willing to work hard, you can earn enough money to buy a house, educate your kids, have health insurance and retire one day without being scared.

The labor movement in America helped deliver on the American Dream. The unions of America fought successfully from the late 1800s until the 1970s to provide good wages and benefits for their broad-based membership, and the country’s middle class boomed. The movement grew out of a recognition that the men and women who did most of the working and sweating, and living and dying, deserved to enjoy the just fruits of their labor as much as the investors and developers who employed them.

The labor movement in America today, however, is very different than it was then. Today, many people who are willing to work hard can’t earn a wage sufficient to lift themselves out of the darkness of poverty into the sunshine of the American Dream. Unfortunately, today’s unions haven’t been able to help them. The view of the car company unions of the 1970s and ’80s soured many Americans on the union movement, and locally, generous police and teacher contracts paid for by struggling taxpayers have given the union movement a black eye.

Today, few people recognize Labor Day as more than a day off, the end of summer or an opportunity to shop. The people working at those retail stores where Labor Day sales abound are probably the most in need of a labor movement. Many hot-button issues of the day, from income inequality to the 1 percent to minimum-wage increases and more, touch on the same issues that inspired the labor movement in the first half of the 20th century, but there really is no clear message or messenger to follow to achieve the contemporary American Dream.

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