for labor day…

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God –

a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single cricket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

~ Mary Oliver ~

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Top 7 Pieces of Rare Good News for US Workers on Labor Day

1. The Christian Science Monitor says that in 2016, US solar businesses employed 260,077 workers – up 25 percent from 2015.

2. That is, the solar energy sector alone employs more people than Apple, Google, and Facebook combined!

3. Solar also employs more people in US electricity generation than oil, gas and coal combined!

4. Solar energy sector jobs grew at a rate 17 times faster than the economy in 2016.

5. SC Times reports that wind jobs grew 9 times faster than the economy as a whole in 2016 and adds,

6. “wind turbine technician is the fastest-growing job in the country.”

7. Each day, US workers erect 10 new wind turbines around America. Each creates 44 years of full-time employment. So at an average of 30 years per worker, that is the equivalent of generating over 200,000 full time jobs that last for a lifetime every year.

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

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the day after his final speech, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968… King went to support garbage workers, who were on strike to protest unsafe conditions, abusive supervisors, low wages and to gain recognition for their union…

“I would like to live a long life,” he said. “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr ~

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the best way to get there is every day to continue the struggle for human dignity, workers’ rights, living wages, and social justice…

and, may we all celebrate our laboring, our birthing a onederful world of love…