Samuel Gompers On Labor Day

No day in the calendar is a greater fixture, one which is more truly regarded as a real holiday, or one which is so surely destined to endure for all time, than the first Monday in September of each recurring year, Labor Day. With time, this day of the year is taking deeper hold in the respect and confidence of the people. It is regarded as the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs might be discussed, placed upon a higher plane of thought and feeling; that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it; meet at their parks, groves and grounds, and by appropriate speech, counsel with, and pledge to, each other that the coming year shall witness greater efforts than the preceding in the grand struggle to make mankind free, true and noble.

  – Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor.
“Labor Day. What It Portends.”
American Federationist.
September, 1898.

Wednesday Wisdom: Louis Brandeis On The Need For Strong Labor Unions

“Strong, responsible unions are essential to industrial fair play.  Without them the labor bargain is wholly one-sided.  The parties to the labor contract must be nearly equal in strength if justice is to be worked out, and this means that the workers must be organized and that their organizations must be recognized by employers as a condition precedent to industrial peace.”

—Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1934

Wednesday Wisdom: Albert Einstein on Academic Freedom

By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also duty: one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true. It is evident that any restriction on academic freedom acts in such a way as to hamper the dissemination of knowledge among the people and thereby impedes rational judgment and action.

– AAUP Member Albert Einstein, 1954

 

The Supreme Court on Academic Freedom

“Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”

– Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967)

 

Martin Luther King Jr. on the Combined Strength of Unions and African Americans

The two most dynamic movements that reshaped the nation during the past three decades are the labor and civil rights movements. Our combined strength is potentially enormous. We have not used a fraction of it for our own good or for the needs of society as a whole. If we make the war on poverty a total war; if we seek higher standards for all workers for an enriched life, we have the ability to accomplish it, and our nation has the ability to provide it. lf our two movements unite their social pioneering initiative, thirty years from now people will look back on this day and honor those who had the vision to see the full possibilities of modern society and the courage to fight for their realization. On that day, the brotherhood of man, undergirded by economic security, will be a thrilling and creative reality.

Speech given to the Illinois State AFL-CIO SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, OCT. 7, 1965

For more great quotations from King’s Speeches to Trade Unions, see this document from the AFL-CIO.

 

Wednesday Wisdom: Labor Day

“The use of national holidays is to emphasize some great event or principle in the minds of the people by giving them a day of rest and recreation, a day of enjoyment, in commemoration of it … (t)here can be no substantial objection to making one day in the year a national holiday for the benefit of labor.”

– U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Labor Report:  Labor Day a Legal Holiday, 1894.