Three years later, in , it was enshrined as an annual holiday albeit without any real perks and has been reaffirmed via annual proclamations issued by every president since Eisenhower. Its name and intent only changed in the late s as the specter of communism haunted the chambers of government and the House Un-American Activities Committee hunted down leftists and suspected sympathizers in a scarlet inquisition.
The erasure of May Day has robbed the U. Want more from Teen Vogue? This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project , a journalism nonprofit.
Organized labor, however, has seen its power steadily decline over the last several decades as deregulation, union-busting, corporate monopolization, and vast wealth inequality diminish the power of individual workers to form collectives. That sharp downturn has reduced the power of unions and the overall power of workers to bargain with corporate bosses for essential things like fairer wages and benefits. As the nature of work in America has shifted from manufacturing and manual labor to the information and technology economy, the decimation of organized labor has become a crisis.
After the vaccine was approved, she drove for 10 hours from Colorado to Kansas to get vaccinated — it was the closest available appointment. Yet another friend, with a congenital kidney disorder, has yet to get vaccinated.
The doctor said that they truly could not predict the side effects of the vaccine, or its effectiveness, for people with the disease. Balancing the risks, they decided that it is safer to follow other precautions, like masking.
Now my friend is worried that, at some point, they'll be mandated by their employer or by the government to get it anyway. These and many, many other individual stories explode the public debate over vaccinations, which oversimplifies the decisions people face and villainizes those who disagree with you. Few people would enter honestly into a conversation where they expect to be demeaned. Those conversations are pre-determined to fail — they fail to persuade, they fail to make us all safer, they fail to sustain our relationships and communities.
As long as we're engaging in toxic, polarized, zero-sum debates about COVID vaccinations, we're going to struggle to build effective policies and public trust, both of which are needed for public health. We can begin to change the national conversation by having better conversations about vaccination in our private lives. It's not easy, but it's not impossible. If you want to engage in a deeper, more meaningful dialogue about vaccines, especially with someone who might disagree with you, here are three questions to ask yourself before you start the conversation:.
People are always changed by what they hear in a deeper, truer conversation with someone else in their community — even if their view or choice remains the same as it was at the start. There is no way to know the outcome of a genuine, open, curious conversation until you actually have one. But one thing is certain. Without better conversations, without interrupting the toxic cycles of polarization, we will not be able to meet the challenges that face our communities today.
Better conversations are crucial if we are to live and work in community, to thrive in community and to survive as a democracy.
If nothing else, the Covid pandemic has reminded us all that our futures are intertwined. The infrastructure bill recently passed by Congress is a rare example of bipartisanship in government.
But the Common Ground Committee, which strives to find a central point from which the parties can work together, is hoping its ratings system will provide guidance for more cross-partisan collaboration. The Common Ground Scorecard rates the president, vice president, governors, and members of the House of Representatives and Senate on their willingness to collaborate across partisan lines. First released in September , the data updated last month.
He said the group was surprised by "how many people are actually good common grounders, and how they come from both parties and are at all levels of government. Among the 20 politicians with the highest scores, 17 are members of the House, two are senators and one is a governor.
Seven are Republicans including the top four and 13 are Democrats. The maximum score is , and the average among all elected officials was But because negative points were assessed for insulting a member of the opposing party, a handful of officials ended up with a final score below zero. Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, had the highest score among senators, earning 80 points, two ahead of her home-state colleague, Joe Manchin, who has a higher profile as one of two Democrats critical to passing legislation in the Senate.
The other, Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, earned 70 points, the minimum to be labeled a "champion" by the Common Ground Committee. Of the seven lowest scores, six belong to House members, including one member of the informal group of progressives known as "the squad" and some of former President Donald Trump's most controversial supporters:.
President Biden earned 41 points, placing him in the "somewhat above average" range. President Trump left office with a score of Nine of the 13 highest scoring House Republicans voted in favor of the infrastructure bill last week, including the top five. But some Republicans at the low end of the scale supported the bill as well, including a pair of New Yorkers, Nicole Malliotakis 4 points and Andrew Garbarino The Common Ground Committee hopes the scorecard will encourage more elected officials and candidates to work across party lines.
Bond identified two specific goals: "Spotlighting those who are 'demonstrating what good looks like' and "informing voters who care about the degree to which a candidate incumbent or challenger is a common grounder. Is our Constitution in crisis? Or did it create one? O'Hara to discuss the structural challenges of the Constitution that have contributed to the growing political stalemate in our Nation's capital.
The continuing disintegration of political cohesion in democracies throughout the world, the rise of authoritarian populism within democracies and the increasing suppressions of entrenched authoritarian regimes have created a growing crisis of failing governance around the globe. The real-world turmoil and trauma driving our governing dysfunctions — political strife and economic inequalities, pandemics, floods, fires, debilitating storms, racial reckonings, and dehumanization of "others" — are bedeviling virtually every economic and political system on every continent throughout the world.
Representative democracies, including most specifically our own constitutional republic, cannot reform our cultural, economic and political institutions to better serve the needs and interests of our citizens and to meet the exigencies of the 21st century until we define a collective purpose and shared meaning that transcends ideology and special interests.
Narrow purpose, party dogmas and rigid ideologies of certainty are endemic to modern cultures, belief systems and political narratives. Spread relentlessly by hyperpartisan, for-profit communications companies and social media, our prejudices, biases and hatreds fester in the body politic like a metastatic cancer.
However, a healthy, constitutionally ordained representative republic cannot forever endure the toxins of resentment and vengeance without forfeiting the ideals of liberty, justice and opportunity for all. Humans cannot thrive, much less survive, without a conscious, courageous and enduring declaration of faith in ourselves and our institutions.
Faith is not simply a religious precept; it is the foundation of human dignity and mutual responsibility. It is the means by which our species finds the will to hope and dream, accepts one another in spite of our differences and discovers common purpose in collective identity.
Faith requires a leap from logic; a belief in the future we have not yet seen or experienced. It begins as a figment of imagination. It manifests as a willingness to entertain affirmative human possibilities. In these fraught times, it is worth trying to discern the elementary "faiths" that define 21st century core beliefs that are necessary to advance classic liberal democracy and combat authoritarianism in America and throughout the world.
The exigencies of the 21st century require a set of beliefs that transcend ideology, tribalism, nationalism, party and special interests. For Americans, this means conscious commitment to five basic faiths that advance an affirmative view of human nature and enable healthy self-governance:. Faith is the essential building block for constructive interpersonal relationships and productive institutional cooperation. Our collective abilities to thrive in the years and decades to come are dependent on restoring the values of truth, trust, reason and civility in our human interactions.
It is in our self- and mutual interests to find the will, courage and strategies necessary to have abiding faith in ourselves, our institutions, our communities and our nation. Leveraging Our Differences. Originally published by The Conversation For many, Labor Day marks the official end of summer celebrated the first Monday of every September with barbecues and back to school shopping.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter However, the organizers had a large problem: No government or company recognized the first Monday in September as a day off work.
Labor Day came about because workers felt they were spending too many hours and days on the job. Enter email Leadership Veterans outperform non-veterans in civic engagement. Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter Those gaps carry over when the data is broken down by age group: 75 percent of younger veterans were registered to vote and Keep Reading Show less. Leveraging big ideas Video: A conversation with Amanda Ripley. A Conversation with Amanda Ripley. Is it about excess in America, as a whole?
Is it a commentary on the hedonism and self-indulgence of the time? Voting Opening primaries is a necessary first step toward bigger reforms. Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter Regardless of which straws you use, you have surely noticed the lack of competition in our elections. Voting New Yorkers defeat vote-by-mail proposal, but D. Voters in New York rejected three proposal to change voting and redistricting. Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter Another proposal, which would have allowed people to register to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day, was also defeated.
Voting Podcast: What makes a campaign deplorable? Voting This country really did experience a fraudulent presidential election Hayes from … Flickr. Media Report suggests plan for limiting election disinformation. Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter "They're not taking any action on disinformation in the campaign," said Littlewood, referring to ongoing claims that the election was stolen, claims that would have been addressed last year.
The statutory recommendations focus on five areas: Voter intimidation and false election speech, including state and federal legislation prohibiting the spread of election disinformation. Campaign finance reforms, such as passing federal and state disclosure laws to expose "dark money" and strengthening the Federal Elections Commission.
Passing media literacy legislation at the state level. Enacting state privacy laws that include civil rights protections. Approving federal legislation to curb some online business practices, such as banning discriminatory algorithms, limiting and protecting the data collected online, and supporting local and watchdog journalism. The regulatory recommendations fall into four buckets: Demonstrating state and federal leadership through executive action to stop the spread of election disinformation.
Stepping up enforcement of state and federal laws that ban voter intimidation and other election interference efforts. Empowering the Federal Trade Commission to step up its privacy protection work. Use the FEC and state agencies to update and enforce disclosure requirements and rules against disinformation.
Finally, Common Cause suggests five areas of improvement for social media corporations: Directing users to official state and local sources of information about voting and elections. Maintaining and improving their self-imposed disinformation rules, throughout election and non-election years. Developing technology, such as artificial intelligence and algorithms that limit the spread of disinformation. Granting journalists and researchers more access to social media data.
Increasing investment in efforts to stop non-English disinformation. Leveraging big ideas How to have a conversation about vaccines at your Thanksgiving table. Hyten is co-executive director of Essential Partners, which equips people to live and work better together by building trust and understanding across differences.
Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter Let me offer two pairs of examples to help illuminate this idea. Leveraging big ideas Yes, there is some common ground in politics, according to this data. Republican Rep. Don Bacon has the highest score on the Common Ground Scorecard. Officials were judged in five categories: Sponsorship of bipartisan bills for legislators or bipartisan job approval for executives.
Having a public conversation across the political divide, visiting a district with a member of the opposite party and joining a legislative caucus that promotes working together. Using communications tools to urge people to find common ground.
Affirmation of a commitment to a set of common ground principles. Winning any of a set of awards for behavior that promotes finding common ground. Of the seven lowest scores, six belong to House members, including one member of the informal group of progressives known as "the squad" and some of former President Donald Trump's most controversial supporters: Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib Mich. Norma Torres Calif. Filemon Vela Texa s: Republican Sen.
John Kennedy La. Matt Gaetz Fla. In the wake of this massive unrest and in an attempt to repair ties with American workers, Congress passed an act making Labor Day a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories. On June 28, , President Grover Cleveland signed it into law.
More than a century later, the true founder of Labor Day has yet to be identified. Many credit Peter J. McGuire, cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, while others have suggested that Matthew Maguire, a secretary of the Central Labor Union, first proposed the holiday. Labor Day is still celebrated in cities and towns across the United States with parades, picnics, barbecues, fireworks displays and other public gatherings. For many Americans, particularly children and young adults, it represents the end of the summer and the start of the back-to-school season.
The Uniform Monday Holiday Act of changed several holidays to ensure they would always be observed on Mondays so that federal employees could have more three-day weekends.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Veterans Day is a U.
In , on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, was declared between the The labor movement in the United States grew out of the need to protect the common interest of workers.
For those in the industrial sector, organized labor unions fought for better wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. The labor movement led efforts to stop child
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