TOPSIDE UPDATE 3, 11:55 P.M.: I wish I wasn’t too tired to listen to 700 AM WLW’s overnight show with truckers. Anyone who listens will hear plenty — and I don’t think Mr. Hoffa or Mr. Obama will like what’s said. Anyone who happens to listen in, let me know, either in the comments or via e-mail (biz at bizzyblog.com).

TOPSIDE UPDATE 2, 11:45 P.M.: At the Daily Caller, (Rockford, Illinois) “Tea party group to Hoffa: Resign!” –

“Calls to violence can never be acceptable in this civil society,” the Rockford, Illinois tea party group said in a statement. “Hoffa’s remarks were made in an introduction to Obama speaking to Auto Workers and Unions in Detroit and this sort of angry, hateful, call to violence should be repudiated by the President with a call from the President to ask Hoffa to resign his very public position of influence.”

TOPSIDE UPDATE, 8 P.M.: The Associated Press is covering the story as follows (7:12 p.m. time stamp, unbylined; saved here in full for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes):

Tea party calls on Obama to rebuke union chief

A tea party group called on President Barack Obama to rebuke Teamsters President Jim Hoffa for urging him to use supporters at a Labor Day rally as an army to march and “take out” tea partyers, describing the remarks as “a call for violence.”

Obama was not on stage at the Detroit rally when Hoffa made the remarks Monday. The White House declined to comment on the flap.

… “Jimmy Hoffa’s remarks are inexcusable and amount to a call for violence on peaceful tea party members, which include many Teamster members,” (Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy) Kremer said. “We have called on President Obama to condemn this inappropriate and uncivil rhetoric, which has no place in the public forum.”

Teamsters spokeswoman Leigh Strope said in a statement: “Workers didn’t start this war – the right-wing tea party zealots did. Jim Hoffa’s comments today reflect the anger of workers under attack in this country. Instead of focusing on the economy as a top priority after taking office, corporate-funded conservatives attempted to gut the middle class.”

This isn’t about a “flap,” AP. It’s about a public “threat.”

The “workers under attack in this country,” Ms. Strope, are those who can’t find work because of the Obama administration’s Fear-Based Economy. It’s completely on him, his administration, his party, and his party’s financial supporters — and no one else.

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That civility thing which Democrats and the Left thought to be all-important earlier this year is sooooo January. Unless it changes its stripes overnight, the incivility and hostility on display today in Detroit, which hasn’t been seen much in establishment press reports to this point, won’t appear on the Big 3 Networks’ morning shows tomorrow. The American people really need to see what has become of the labor movement, and the type of behavior its head cheerleader in the White House condones.

Before President Obama spoke in the parking lot of a General/Government Motors plant in Detroit this afternoon, Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. warmed up the crowd, as transcribed below (video at Right Scoop; HT Temple of Mut via Instapundit):

Hoffa: We’ve got to keep an eye on the battle that we face, a war on workers. And you see it everywhere. It is the Tea Party. And y’know there’s only one way to beat and win that war.

The one thing about working people is, we like a good fight. And you know what? They got a war, they got a war with us, and there’s only gonna be one winner, it’s going to be the workers of uh Michigan and America! We’re gonna win that war!

– (snip) –

President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong. Thank you very much. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

(more…)

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Wednesday (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

This post is a BizzyBlog Labor Day tradition.

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From the May 3, 2008 version of a web page as it originally appeared at the US Department of Labor’s web site (obtained from archive.org):

The History of Labor Day
Labor Day: How it Came About; What it Means

“Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country,” said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. “All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day…is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

Founder of Labor Day

More than 100 years after the first Labor Day observance, there is still some doubt as to who first proposed the holiday for workers.

Some records show that Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, was first in suggesting a day to honor those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.”

But Peter McGuire’s place in Labor Day history has not gone unchallenged. Many believe that Matthew Maguire, a machinist, not Peter McGuire, founded the holiday. Recent research seems to support the contention that Matthew Maguire, later the secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, N.J., proposed the holiday in 1882 while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York. What is clear is that the Central Labor Union adopted a Labor Day proposal and appointed a committee to plan a demonstration and picnic.

The First Labor Day

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

In 1884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a “workingmen’s holiday” on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.

Labor Day Legislation

Through the years the nation gave increasing emphasis to Labor Day. The first governmental recognition came through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. From them developed the movement to secure state legislation. The first state bill was introduced into the New York legislature, but the first to become law was passed by Oregon on February 21, 1887. During the year four more states — Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — created the Labor Day holiday by legislative enactment. By the end of the decade Connecticut, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania had followed suit. By 1894, 23 other states had adopted the holiday in honor of workers, and on June 28 of that year, Congress passed an act making the first Monday in September of each year a legal holiday in the District of Columbia and the territories.

A Nationwide Holiday

The form that the observance and celebration of Labor Day should take were outlined in the first proposal of the holiday — a street parade to exhibit to the public “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations” of the community, followed by a festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families. This became the pattern for the celebrations of Labor Day. Speeches by prominent men and women were introduced later, as more emphasis was placed upon the economic and civic significance of the holiday. Still later, by a resolution of the American Federation of Labor convention of 1909, the Sunday preceding Labor Day was adopted as Labor Sunday and dedicated to the spiritual and educational aspects of the labor movement.

The character of the Labor Day celebration has undergone a change in recent years, especially in large industrial centers where mass displays and huge parades have proved a problem. This change, however, is more a shift in emphasis and medium of expression. Labor Day addresses by leading union officials, industrialists, educators, clerics and government officials are given wide coverage in newspapers, radio, and television.

The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.