People, Planet, Profit

Labor Day is about much more than a three-day weekend symbolically marking the end of summer. The first Monday in September was set apart as a time to celebrate the labor movement’s role in securing worker’s rights. As one popular bumper sticker says, “From the People that Brought You the Weekend.” Indeed, extrapolating from the Labor Movement’s successes, in the late nineteenth century, many of our nation's best economists regularly predicted that, well before the twentieth century ended, a Golden Age of Leisure would arrive, when no one would have to work more than two hours a day. We'll explore what happened, and what we can do differently here in the early twenty-first century. (9/2/2018)