"For too many Floridians, Labor Day is an ironic joke. Instead of enjoying a day off, they'll be toiling to serve restaurant meals, maintain golf courses and wash cars they can never hope to afford.
The state has plenty of jobs, but too many of them are lousy: Picking ferns, salting French fries, cleaning hotel-room toilets, turning on gas pumps. Floridians are addicted to work, starved for pay and constantly teetering on the edge of economic meltdown.
Every Labor Day, Florida International University's Center for Labor and Research Studies, headed by economist Bruce Nissen, outlines the bleak plight of workers in statistics. This year's figures show a steady decline in workers' welfare -- a trend met with stony silence from most of the state's leaders."
See this site, by Nathan Newman, for a comprehensive discussion of the meaning of labor day.
Labor Day Editorials - It is curious to see how, every Labor Day, newspapers sidestep any discussion of the key role of the labor movement in U.S. history, democracy, and economic development. This willful ignorance is hardly surprising because, with few exceptions, each major newspaper in the state is owned by large faceless corporations, which naturally despise the notion of workers acting in concert to improve their lot. Indeed, most, if not all, of the state's papers have no unionized employees; and, those papers that were once were organized, have in most instances shed their unions (some with brutal anti-union campaigns). Hence, it is no surprise that labor unions are yet again out of the picture this Labor Day. Let's take a look at the state's editorial pages today:
- Editorials Discussing Labor Unions: The only major Florida newspaper editorial to actually discuss labor unions this Labor Day is the Florida Times Union. And, what the Times Union has to say is less than complimentary; the editors actually argue that because workers' "pay generally is excellent", unions are essentially irrelevant.
- Editorials About Labor Day That Do Not Mention Labor Unions At All: Although including editorials about Labor Day and/or workers, a number of editorial boards succeeded in avoiding any mention of labor unions; these papers are the Miami Herald, the Orlando Sentinel, the Sarasota Herald Tribune (although it does criticize "salary discrepancies in this land of 'equality'") and the Daytona Beach News Journal (although they do publish the spectacular editorial quoted at the outset).
- Labor Unions Mentioned Only In Passing: The Palm Beach Post was kind enough to at least mention mention that "Labor Day has become linked with unions, and the holiday did grow out of the American labor movement." See "Economy healthy when job pulse rises". However, he Post quickly makes up for it, though, with . . .
- A Cheap Shot: " The Palm Beach Post went out of its way to take a cheap shot at labor on its editorial pages today in A labor leader's betrayal".
- Another Cheap Shot: Although not an editorial, one of the most anti-union articles we've ever seen on Labor Day appears in the "liberal" St Pete Times, with the snappy headline "A less perfect union".
The "Jeb!" Loyalists -Carolyn Roberts led the fight to defeat a constitutional amendment creating a board to run Florida's 11 state universities and she lost -- an overwhelming 60.5 percent of voters disagreed with her. Now Roberts is chairwoman of the Board of Governors created by the same Amendment 11 she worked so hard to defeat, thanks to an appointment by Gov. Jeb Bush. Bush, who also opposed creating the board, has drawn fire from critics who say the group that was supposed to reform the university system is just a pale shadow of what voters wanted. Instead of solving the crises going on in higher education, critics say, the board is a "do-nothing body" that allows lawmakers to usurp its powers.
. . .
State Senate President Jim King, R-Jacksonville, said it isn't surprising the board has not acted aggressively, partly because it is new, and because that's just politics. "Their loyalties are going to be to Jeb. That's how it works," King said. "If Jeb says go right, they're certainly not going to deliberately go left."
Your Telephone Bill Is Going Up - A little reminder from Mr. Troxler:
Let's be crystal clear about this.
Your local telephone bill is going up.
It's going up because the telephone companies paid big money to the state legislators to pass a bill.
The governor signed that bill into law.
Last week, Florida's three biggest phone companies all bellied up to the bar - on the same afternoon, just before 5 p.m. Wednesday - and filed their paperwork to get their rate increases under this law.
They're in a hurry, too. They were supposed to "phase in" the increases over as many as four years. They want it all in two.
And now, the state Public Service Commission will prove exactly what the critics said was true all along.
The law is a sham.
. . .
The law was written in secret by lobbyists. The public was never heard.
The process was not fair. It was not democratic. It was stacked, greased and paid for.
The process was corrupt.
And they thought that if they timed it to happen exactly between elections, you, the voter, would be a sucker and forget.