This Labor Day, as opposed to unions organizing parades celebrating the work done by union members’ hands, today’s parades are more a testament to the failure of private-sector unions and the plague that public-sector unions have become.

Five years after writing an essay entitled The Labor Movement is Brain Dead (and it’s time to pull the plug), in the age of government paternalism, when capital flows with the click of a mouse, and their own defective product is as injurious to the nation as it is to the unions’ own members, today’s union bosses still fail to grasp that, if they are ever to survive, they must move away from the 1930s model of unions that yesterday’s Marxists tried to instill (and today’s union leaders have wholeheartedly embraced) and offer something of value.

Instead of buying politicians and aligning themselves with European socialists, which is all today’s union bosses seem proficient at, were they to be interested in building a lasting labor movement, their efforts would be focused on adding value through their labor instead of sapping the treasury of this nation.  Perhaps today’s union bosses, instead of falling into the trap of socialism, should revisit the history of their movement and its founders.

Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), the founder of American Federation of Labor, was a staunch opponent of socialism:

The Socialists in our organization formed an inner clique for the purpose of controlling elections and voters upon legislation. Socialist publications, Socialist organizers and propagandists spread the poison of hatred and discontent, thus weakening confidence in the integrity of the officers of the union. According to my experience professional Socialism accompanies instability of judgment or intellectual undependability caused by an inability to recognize facts. The conspicuous Socialists have uniformly been men whose minds have been warped by a great failure or who found it absolutely impossible to understand fundamentals necessary to developing practical plans for industrial betterment.

Isn’t it funny how history repeats itself?  Relying on the welfare of Big Government was not something the Founders of the American Labor Movement would have condoned.  Yet, that is where today’s union bosses are today.

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This Labor Day, as we hear union bosses clamoring to be fed billions more out from the public trough for additional bailouts, the question that must be asked is:  How much more can a broken economy take before the nation goes bankrupt? By coincidence, and almost in answer to that question, one of the commentators in the above clip, Charles Goyette, wrote a frightening book called The Dollar Meltdown.  [And, yes, it is frightening.]

As union bosses and their leftist allies are prepared to spend $200 million (+) to buy another election cycle, it’s time for Americans (including union members) to make a choice in November: Big Unions and Big European-Style Government, or America, as its Founders intended.

And, there is no day like Labor Day to rest up for the fight ahead.

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“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.”  Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.