by Tula Connell, Sep 5, 2006

Unless you’re in New York City, where the New York City Central Labor Council is holding its annual Labor Day parade and mass for next weekend, Labor Day 2006 is pretty much over.

But as we noted last week, we agree with CBS correspondent Dick Meyer who recently wrote that Labor Day should be celebrated for a full week—and we’re not quite ready to let it go just yet.

Here’s a wrap up of some Labor Day highlights.

• Virgil Hill from Springfield, Mo., becomes our final winner in the Aug. 28–Sept. 4 AFL-CIO Labor Day quiz. On Labor Day, Bollenbach was the first to correctly answer that Social Security, between 1960 and 2004, helped cut the poverty rate among seniors by more than two-thirds, from 35 percent to 10 percent.   

Hill joins six other daily winners who will receive a “Got a Boss? Get a Union” mug compliments of The Union Shop Online.™ See the full list of winners and the questions they correctly answered here.

• On Labor Day, we crossposted “Why Won’t Workers Join Unions?” on             DailyKos. Click here to read some of the more than 200 comments in response to the post and the related discussion threads.    
   
• AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s busy Labor Day weekend included a             discussion with Ed Schultz on the progressive talk show host’s nationwide radio show (click here to listen to a podcast of Sweeney discussing the future of unions and the midterm elections).

In addition to joining Detroit-area workers for a parade and forum on U.S. trade and job loss, Sweeney spoke Saturday on the “Workin’ It with Jackie Guerra” show on Air America and wrote in a Labor Day blog post at The Hill blog discussing the “perfect storm” that may well sweep away Republican control of the Congress this fall.

Writing in his AFL-CIO online column, Out Front, Sweeney shows why the AFL-CIO is launching its most aggressive midterm election voter education and mobilization campaign. Here’s one reason: The Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have created an economy that is strangling working families and squeezing the life out of America’s middle class.

• Missed our series of posts highlighting some of the historical contributions of       workers and their unions? Here’s the wrap:

                        Why Won’t Workers Join Unions?
                        Labor Day—A Poor Cousin to May Day?
                        Working-Class Women: On the Front Lines of Feminism
                        The Face of Child Labor
                        Eight Hours for What We Will!
 

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