Today’s Labor Day Parade through Rochester is in honour of a worker’s right to Unionize. Huh! Well, nice to know that some people do still see that as a right:

Parade theme is ‘right to unionize’ | Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Rochester’s 21st annual Labor Day Parade is scheduled to start at 11 a.m. and will end when the last participant reaches Andrews Street. This year’s theme is Workers Right to Organize, according to the Rochester and Vicinity Labor Council, AFL-CIO. Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks and other local elected officials are expected to lead the parade. Employees of the Crowne Plaza Hotel on State Street in downtown Rochester will be in the forefront of the event this year, in recognition of their efforts to form a new union.

I’m not a member of a union, primarily because my industry is sorely lacking of unions. It can feel a bit strange to talk about such things as industry and unions when I don’t belong to a union and I left my industry job five years ago to work in IT. Nevertheless, in some respects my story is a decent analogy of what’s going on all across the country. I was told when I got laid off from my last machinist job that the New York State Department of Labor considered me a “displaced worker,” meaning that they didn’t expect to get me another job in my current field for at least a year.  Imagine that!  These are the people responsible for paying my unenjoyment check every week, and even they have no faith in my future employment.

That’s what has happened to industry in this state, this city and this country.  Industry is drying up in favour of finance and services.  And before you go buying into the whole “outsourcing,” lower-cost-labour, keeping-up-with-the-Jones-Corporation rag, keep in mind that both German and Japan are producing more hard goods per capita than the United States with comparable and even higher labour costs.

But there are good reasons to keep certain facets of industry in this country, reasons for which there has not been greater egress of jobs in the last ten years, even if the corporations nominally considered American might wish otherwise.  As much as the rhetoric of the Bush Administration and Conservatives is that unions are a threat to those remaining jobs, the truth is that those jobs can’t go anywhere else in the first place, and unions are the only hope of protecting workers rights in a system so completely bought out by corporations.

So, this Labor Day, be proud of those in the streets who unionize with pride.  Without the unions, without protections for hard industries in this country, our Middle Class and our entire way of being Americans will crumble.  And this October, consider which candidates have been friendly and which have been unfriendly to the cause of unionization.

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