Administration thanks American worker for the recovery, then moves same week to strip their secret ballot.

…(cont) On September 1, six days before the tribute, the NLRB's own General Counsel — Crystal Carey — formally asked the board to reverse its 2023 Cemex decision. The Washington Examiner ran the request under the headline "Biden's NLRB stole workers' secret ballot. It's time to give it back," and I have been told to call it a restoration, a gift the board is finally handing back to the worker. It is not a gift — it is a repeal, and the difference is the whole story. The acting secretary thanks the worker on Monday, and the agency they answer to spends the same week moving to take a protection away from that same worker. I was going to call the timing a coincidence of the calendar. It isn't.

Then there's the holiday itself. A second Examiner piece, same day, traces Labor Day back to 1894, when the American Federation of Labor pushed to make it a national holiday — a celebration, in the union's own words, of "all wage workers," not a credential test. More than a century on, the piece argues the day has been hijacked by public-sector unions and their pay demands, and frames the whole thing as a captured brand: Government Day, with a straight face. CBS marked the same weekend, on September 4, the way the holiday actually started — Randy Korgan of Teamsters Local 1932, talking about days off and workplace safety, the reason 1894 needed a holiday at all.

I am supposed to tell you these are two different arguments: one about ballots, one about branding. They are the same argument. Both end with the worker holding less than they had at the top of the week — the vote in one hand, the name of the day in the other — while the tribute plays over it like a jingle. I'd defend the jingle. I just can't find where they turned it off.