A STITCH IN...

by Maria Lisella

Tell clothing brands to support workers by signing the Transparency Pledge. The vast majority of workers do not know whom to turn to for improving their working conditions because the brands they make clothes for are kept secret. This lack of transparency allows brands to avoid accountability and fuels abuses against workers. Transparency benefits workers—they can inform brands when they experience labor abuses. Transparency also helps brands—they can better take steps to stop and prevent labor abuses. Currently, 40 companies have committed to the Transparency Pledge, but hundreds continue to hide where they make their clothes. Workers and shoppers deserve to know where brands make their clothes. This shopping season, call on American Eagle Outfitters, Armani, Carrefour and URBN (Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie, Nuuly) to support workers by publishing a list of all factories that make their branded products. —Human Rights Watch

It required a stitch or two and so I tacked it
the two tabs that were sticking out
of her cheap striped shirt—
made in Bangladesh reads the label
where women who know nothing
about raised fists of labor united or
the IWW, or the AFL-CIO, sweat
for 14 hours a day, and 35 cents an hour
turn out shirts just like this one stitched
with labels that read: H&M, Calvin Klein,
Ann Taylor, Zara, Target and, yet,
when a factory goes up in flames or
crumbles to the ground in New Delhi,
Bangladesh, Ahmedabad, collapsing
into tangles of steel, concrete blocks,
mortar, or fizzle in flames, the label-owners
deny those women have ever
been making their products and those
women have nothing to do with their
$2.4 trillion dollars in profits.


Maria Lisella is the outgoing Queens Poet Laureate and a newly-named fellow of the American Academy of Poets; she is a travel writer by trade.

SWEAT IS NO LONGER THE COIN OF THE LAND

by George Salamon

"Of all the days celebrated for one cause or another, there is not one which stands so conspicuously for the social advancement of the common people as the first Monday in September," Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, The New York Times, September 4, 1910


"While you're planning that Labor Day weekend family cookout or a last minute getaway to one of the world's best food cities, we're gearing up for some serious savings in the form of Labor Day 2018 sales," in "All Of the Labor Day 2018 Sales You Need To Know About," The Huffington Post, August 24, 2018


Who still loves ya, underpaid
Working stiffs of America?
Laboring on  assembly lines,
In the streets and sewers of cities,
In fields on farms, scrubbing
Hospital floors and cleaning
Offices in the towers of wealth.
You've been abandoned and deceived,
Promises were broken, leaving your
Hopes and expectations unrealized.
Sweat is no longer the coin of the land.
Fat cats who control the price at which
Your labor is bought and sold
Turned you into losers in
The marketplace they own.
Once celebrated as the backbone of
America, as heirs to Rosie the Riveter
And Joe Lunchpail, you've been
Dehumanized and deplored.
The bargain you made for that
Shot at the American Dream
Was shredded, equal opportunity for all
Became an unmentionable in the
Corridors of power and at the
Spectacle theater of the ballot box.
Things could be different, but you
Struggle to imagine a future that is
Different from what is.
Let's enlist in the task of
Building a people's democracy,
Inspired by a many-splendored Dream
Bigger than the one for the self and the few.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO. once a strong union city.

AN AMERICAN WORKER SPEAKS TO THE LEADERS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

by George Salamon

This graphic appeared in various newspapers on Labor Day, 1941. The prose poem beneath the graphic reads as follows: I am Labor. I stand before you on this, my day, free and proud. I am the incarnation of Work, and Work is the foundation of modern civilization. Before the silvery bombers can take the air my skilled fingers have fashioned and serviced them. The shining shell, the precise rifle, the intricate clockwork of tank and ship, these grew beneath the trained and intelligent hands with which I get my living. Because the things I do are basic and necessary, I yeld my dignity to no man. Because of that dignity, I prize my manhood and my freedom. I Shall defend it. To those who would degrade me to an automation, make me a slave, I return loud and scornful laughter. Here in my United States I am more than a Worked, more than a Laborer, I am a Man. This manhood, this freedom, on my own Labor Day of 1941, I do not propose to yield. Source: Urania.

"Republican politicians have always been in our pocket. Now we have most of the Democrats."  Jeff Faux, "Class War: The view from the Board Room," The American Prospect, January 15, 2014

"We have set up a series of policies that work for those at the top and leave everyone else behind. And what I say is it's time to change that." Senator Elizabeth Warren, "On the road with Sanders and Warren: Will the Democrats follow them to the left?"  The Guardian, August 27, 2017


Once we were brothers and sisters. you and me,
Standing together to battle America's plutocracy.
We fought the same sweatshops, the heartless boss,
The same low wages, capitalism's cross.
You helped balance the economic scales of power,
FDR even made the cruel bankers cower.
But, Nancy and Chuck, you were skillful and quick
To get out from under, you mastered that trick.
We toiled and endured, we had little choice
While you were able to gain a powerful voice.
We trusted you, then, do you remember when?
When the New Deal gave us the right to organize,
Granting millions a fair chance in the race of life.
When your party tried to eradicate poverty,
Moving us a step closer to social equality.
Then the political wheel turned to the right,
Many Democrats abandoned our common fight.
For decades now, we've tumbled into rage and despair,
Even helped elect a huckster billionaire.

This is now, but we both need what was then.
On this day of labor, remember when.

George Salamon who lives in St. Louis, MO would love to see the "for" return to "government for the people."

LABOR'S LOST LOVE:A LAMENT FOR LABOR DAY

by George Salamon

"We don't really care if the economy is in tatters'cause no one is doing badly; well, at least no one who matters."               —“Send a Billionaire to Camp," Union Song by Davis Gloff

Hey, folks, you old enough to remember
When Labor Day was for America's working stiff?
For the bricklayer, printer, the waitress in the diner.
Well, today our masses celebrate something finer:
The lifestyles of the rich and famous,
The antics of adolescent celebrities and pubescent starlets
Where once, in the decade after Rosie the Riveter
Chester Riley the riveter played the backbone of America.

Those were the days but they did end.
Now Labor Day means hunting for bargains at Walmart
Where working stiffs are stiffed every day
And "organized labor" is dirty talk.
Politicians mumble "working American"
The way TV anchors slur over "sex offender"
Before moving on to the latest thrill
Provided by the Kardashians and their kin.

The blue-collar life is for losers,
An occasional joke for sitcoms' white collar elite,
For the upwardly mobile professionals we
All want to be with fewer than ever making it.
Blue-collar misery, studies tell us, is a
Life-long journey and the American Dream reserved for a few,
For masters of the resume who become priests in the
Church at the intersection of Wall Street and Capitol Hill.

There's nothing to celebrate on Labor Day if
You're toiling on the assembly line or sweating on the loading platform,
If your collar is blue and the music of your life even bluer.
You got sourced out and sold out by business and government.
You are anachronisms fearfully waiting to be replaced by the robots of tomorrow.
So, indulge in a bit of nostalgia on Labor Day and listen to Pete Seeger doing
"Solidarity Forever" or Phil Ochs singing "The Ballad of Joe Hill."
A touch of sweetness for life's bitter pill.


George Salamon taught German literature and culture at several East Coast colleges, served as staff reporter for the St. Louis Business Journal and senior editor on Defense Systems Review. He published a study of Arnold Zweig's novels of Word War One and a reader in German history. He contributes to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.

HOFFA, AFTER LABOR DAY

by David Feela

The arrow points to where Anthony "Tony Z" Zerilli says Jimmy Hoffa was buried in Oakland Township, Michigan (Oakland Press, June 17, 2013). Other reports claim Hoffa was "garroted by Anthony 'Tony Pro' Provenzano, a notorious New York mobster" in Inkster, Mich., and fed into a wood chipper (Huffington Post, June 21, 2013).

The ground is hard,
not worth turning,
and of the mystery
the air has cleared.

We gather at the lake,
park, or every backyard
we ever mowed,
all our sorrow at the passing
of summer served up cold.
 
The celebration lasts
three days, but Tuesday comes
and we take our places
in a line of expectations,
the ones we formulated
for the future against the ones
imposed by bosses.

“How was your weekend?”
Fine, great, stupendous,
we claim, but the truth,
like Hoffa is that the time,
it just disappeared.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

A CHANGE IN AIR

by James Cronin

A change in air soon defines a lonely beach
after Labor Day, as if a calmed breeze,
dark clouds and serene gunmetal seas
could lineate my life’s declining reach.

A world away, the gassed move, but not much,
the juvenile debate of where to draw,
or not, a line in sand. Its final flaw
—the dead don’t count—waits for sand’s tacit touch.

Displayed, as in an Irish wake gone mad,
the bodies, lacking souls that once they had,
their lungs gargled with blood, the air as gun,

it’s murder, and it cries out, but for what?
Revenge?  Justice? The law is pled for naught.
What sire lets sand entomb the rising sun?


After a four decade career in the law, James Cronin has returned to his first loves, literary studies and writing.

PARTY BLOCK

by Howard Winn

I have to confess I am not a block party sort of person
and I live on a block that has an outdoor party
in the neighborhood of Labor Day.
I go, usually, to prove that I am not a snob;
although, I would prefer that those people
ringing the barbecue did not think about the fact
that I am an English teacher. “Oh, English was always
my worst subject,” they say, taking a step backwards
in case I beat them about the head with a run-on sentence,
or attempt surgery without anesthetic on their split infinitive.
Body language is always clear, if not their expository prose.
I suppose I must be a snob since I cannot discuss the Super Bowl,
the World Series, nor do I have another Bud with my burger,
knowing that the Big Mac Double Cheeseburger
is a weapon of mass destruction,
eating and drinking neither at this block back yard party
of the good people in my neighborhood who ask for
a moment of silence from us while one says Grace
to the lawn, the trimmed hedges, the bird feeder where
the squirrels forage, elbowing aside the finch and chickadee.
Deer walk through the yards, consuming ornamental shrubs;
wild turkeys chuckle in the woods at some fowl joke.
Do they all have a moment of holy silence
before consuming the natural and unnatural set before them?


Most recently Howard Winn had poems and fiction published in The Dalhousie Review, Descant (Canada), Cactus Heart, Main Street Rag, Caduceus, Burning Word,  Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Southern Humanities Review, Cutting Edgz and Borderlands. His B. A. is from Vassar College. His graduate degree is from the Writing Program at Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at New York University. He is a State University of New York faculty member.