People around the world don’t know about or celebrate Labor Day. Other countries salute their workers on the first of May, May Day. In America, the day was moved to the first Monday in September, at summer’s end, to remove all whiffs of radicalism from it. It is now commemorated at the backyard barbeque, not the barricades. Regardless, I send our readers Labor Day greetings.

If you want to read more about it, The NATION , a mediachannel.org affiliate carries an excellent assessment of the US Labor movement this week.

Mediachannel.org is taking Labor Day off, a well deserved break for those who labor in these digital mines.

On a sadder note, may I mark the memories of some people I admired who left us recently.

•Richard Cloward, the social work professor who became a leading advocate for the poor in America. (Today, the Census Department reported that 12% of the people in this richest country in the world live in poverty!) He was an organizer’s organizer along with his wife and co-conspirator Frances Fox Piven.

•Nora Sayre, a wonderfully engaged journalist, writer and author who I first met through the late Andrew Kopkind. She was always supportive of my work–and her books remains a joy to read.

•And in South Africa, Govan Mbeki, one of the stalwarts of the anti-apartheid struggle, father of Thabo Meki, now the country’s president. but always far more of an insurgent who spent far too many years locked away with Nelson Mandela and Coms on Robben Island.

As the South Africans sing, Hamla Kanhe. Farewell.

See you next week.