Labor Reader: Detroit, Labor Day and a Hard Day's Night

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)"The Beatles first visited Detroit just before Labor Day in 1964, and they gushed with admiration for the Motown sound.  Detroit hummed with industry then, like the Beatle’s own Liverpool, England with its bustling ports and pop music scene.   Both industrial cities would soon flounder, losing 40 percent of their populations over the next 30 years. As we approach Labor Day 2013, Detroit still endures its “Hard Day’s Night,” filing for bankruptcy last month.  Yet Liverpool thrives once more, a showroom for urban renaissance. Why did Detroit and Liverpool follow such different paths?" In this post on The Hill's Congress Blog, former AFL-CIO staffer Anna Lane Windham -- now a PhD candidate in history at the University of Maryland -- shows that “workforces thrive best in a challenging world economy when they have a solid, government social safety net, not one woven from the vanishing threads of employer-provided job security and benefits.”