by Nick Taylor
We need to honor American workers once again by committing to paying them a living wage. Otherwise, we might as well drop Labor Day and substitute a holiday dedicated to low prices. We could call it Underwater Worker Day.
Labor Day began in 1894 to celebrate the American worker. Lately, however, American workers have lost ground on jobs, wages, and union representation. One result is depopulation of the middle class and an erosion of the traditional American dream — that we can all find a spot on the ladder to a better life.
Our economy now takes advantage of workers in the name of providing cheap consumer goods. Saving money is great! Everybody likes a bargain. But what’s the advantage when those bargains come at the expense of people who can’t afford to buy what they’re employed to produce or sell? Henry Ford understood this contradiction. It’s why he took the unheard-of step of doubling his assembly line workers’ pay to $5 a day in 1914 so they could buy the Model T’s they were making.
The U.S. House of Representatives and many employers continue to resist President Obama’s call to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from the current $7.25. It’s been the same since 2009 and even the proposed increase lags far behind worker productivity. At the same time, according to The New York Times, some employers manipulate time sheets, pile on unpaid overtime and commit other forms of wage theft. And some anti-regulation politicians think bringing back child labor would be a good idea.
We get it that employers need to stay in business if they’re to provide jobs. But a rush to the bottom, where workers are squeezed for every penny, leaves families poorer financially, emotionally, and in terms of opportunity.
Or, better yet, we could rededicate ourselves to celebrate labor and raise wages.
So I just cheated and added a big pot of purple asters. But beyond the brick walls of my tiny urban garden, it’s always a pleasure to see other people’s gardens hanging on, too.
That’s why during the second week of August, when my friend Jeanmarie Woods said she wanted to look at gardens in the hills above the harbor in Camden, Maine, I joined her eagerly.
Midway through our walk, we spotted Lynette Walther, working away as though it were May or June. Lynette, on her hands and knees, struggled to dig up an old bush she considered a predator. She was eager to substitute a friendly type of rhododendron.
Everything gave her pleasure, from the seasonal lantana to Rose of Sharon, her clematis, which still bloomed, to oak leaf hydrangea and other hydrangea varieties, purple worts, a multitude of ferns, rapidly fading Echinacea, which is very popular in Maine, phlox, plants that looked like purple salvia and a small cascade of Japanese Hakone grass that grabbed our attention.
I loved the purple stargazer lilies that took center stage in the front of her home.
The care 
“Don’t be afraid to experiment and move things when you don’t like them in a particular place,” she said. She surprised us when she didn’t tick off a list of fancy growers to supply plants. Instead she suggested the growers whose plants you can find practically anyplace, “
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Two-year-old Muhammadou, neatly dressed in a striped Calvin Klein tank top, green shorts and sandals, looks like his 6’4″ dad’s Mini-Me. He tugs at his Amadou’s legs and grins showing all his tiny teeth. There’s almost no clearing for the toddler to play without bumping into his father or mother. His four-year-old sister Mame was sent to stay with family in Senegal because the apartment is too small to hold the four of them.
Companies like Viltex, a for-profit recycler based in Newark, NJ, puts its own bins out on city streets.
“Despite the national Do Not Call Registry, strict rules concerning robocalls, and other protections, unwanted and fraudulent phone calls are still plaguing American consumers,” said Susan Grant, Director of Consumer Protection at CFA.
The law enforcement officers, two U.S. Marshals and an NYPD detective, part of the fugitive task force,were doing their job. They followed a lead to a head shop on West 4th to arrest suspected child molester Charles Mozdir.
Two years ago, the Coronado Police Department in the San Diego, California area put out a fugitive alert for him. It’s safe to say that Mozdir was the worst kind of creep. He’d been taking care of friends’ four year old son while he was ill, and the little boy told his parents that Mozdir abused him.
The Fugitive Squad found Mozdir working in the smoke shop. Investigators, as of this posting, are still figuring out what happened. But it’s thought that NYPD detective Mario Munoz entered the store first. He saw Mozdir and went out to get the marshals waiting on the narrow sidewalk. When the three went in, Mozdir opened fire, according to Police Commissioner William Bratton.
