Since it’s appropriate to Labor Day, and since NEA Executive Director Bob Walsh has already invoked his name in an earlier comment, let’s post a few more quotes from Samuel Gompers, the first President of the American Federation Labor. This is my personal favorite…

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

Anyone want to take a stab at applying this wisdom to public-sector organizations?
Also, here’s another quote from the Gomp, less pithy but still interesting, on the subject of social welfare policy…

Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment. In the last analysis the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers. Let social busy-bodies and professional “public morals experts” in their fads reflect upon the perils they rashly invite under this pretense of social welfare.

Is the entire Gompers package of ideas still in play over on the left, or has the modern labor movement reduced him to a guy on a street corner shouting “I want more”?
(And is Pat Crowley now going to write Samuel Gompers off as a right-wing neo-con plant?)