“Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day.
Monday, Monday, sometimes it just turns out that way.
Oh, Monday mornin’, you gave me no warnin’ of what was to be.
Oh, Monday, Monday, how could you leave and not take me?”
(“Monday, Monday” – the Mamas and Papas – 1966 – John Phillips)
Ah, Monday, the traditional start of the work week for millions of Americans. The song says, in its condemnation of Mondays, “every other day of the week is fine.” In popular nomenclature, it is known as “Blue Monday,” the day that marks the end of the weekend and the beginning of the drudgery of just another workweek.
In years past, that drudgery was something that the “working man” endured, week after week, so that he could make it to the weekend and spend sometime with his family. If he was lucky, he got a two-week vacation in the summer and took a road trip with the wife and kids to the mountains or the lake. That was his life, week after week, working for the same old company, until he earned his retirement and hung up his lunch pail. If he was relatively healthy, he might look forward to ten or twelve years of retirement before being laid to rest.
Life is no longer like that. For millions of Americans, there is no job to go to on Monday morning. Working for the same company for years is very unusual, given the plant closings and migration of jobs south and east. The company’s loyalty to the worker no longer exists and the worker’s loyalty to the company has faded over the years.
America is no longer home to the “working man.” It now takes two incomes to support a family and to guard against layoffs and job eliminations. The drudgery of the work week has been replaced, for so many, by the drudgery of endless and fruitless searching for a job.
America’s greatness has been the strength of our working class – men and women toiling in our factories and fields, putting food on the tables of their families and gold in the pockets of their employers. Now, the gap between the rich and poor is as great as it has been in decades and job security is a distant memory.
Where do we go from here? Are America’s best days behind her?
What is the next chapter for the American “working man?”
William Stephenson Clark
PrairiePopulistsAndProgressives.net 
As my dad watched me going through the trials and tribulation of becoming a part of the work force.
He as he always did had bits of advise and lessons to teach me.
One I remember was his advise on being a employee, that though a company would love to have their entire work force made up of those who out work everyone else and produce prefect things every time.
They would rather have someone that they could count on to be on time and there when the schedule said they were to be.
Some one they could count on to take care of the company in their work and in return the company would take care of them.
Once you had the job, you would give a good days work and invest twenty or more years in that company then retire.
Dad put in 33 years with Cessna, a job later on I discovered he hated but still went to everyday.
And continued through his knees giving out and years of some different two-bit minor dictators who solely want to show who was boss. Usually by degrading and abusing those under them who were not of they favor.
Though I too have suffered under such two-bit dictator in my working life.
It does seem those days of having the same job till you retire is over.
Oddly it has been those jobs I had the intention of having till retirement that have ended up being the shortest runs of all.
While the jobs that I had no intention of having longer then it took to find one I preferred.
That I had kept the longest, the stint in Oklahoma is the classic example of one I intend to have till I was too old.
It lasted only a year and a half and it was not my decision to leave I was forced out by some of those two-bit dictators that made up the city council.
Wal-Mart is the example to the other side, I only intend to have that job till I could find a better job. And I was there for over eight years!
Today I am feeling like a race horse who still can run and within seeing distance of the race track.
I see other race horses running the race and long to be among them. But the fences that has been put up holds me back and as of yet I have not found the weak spot to bust through to the race track.
Looking forward I am beginning to see what appears my pen is one meant to hold those intended for the glue factory.
It was definitely easier for a worker to put food on his family ten years ago than it is today.
lol, yes.
With regard to the ‘news’ and speculation about Hawker Beechcraft. The company hasn’t had management that gives a damn since Mrs. Winters, Olive Ann’s secretary, was running things! Walter, Olive Ann and Mrs Winters cared more about that company and each employee than anyone has since or ever will again. In turn, the employees would have done anything, gone the extra mile anytime, because it was mutual — that caring, that loyalty.
It was a fine, superior product made by employees who took pride in each task, took pride in working for a company that took pride in each worker.
Will we ever see that again?
It looks to me like we are returning to a newly-globalized version of the 19th century,i.e., where the working people become tools at the mercy of the powerful.
And this being the 21st century, when so many unbelievable things had been achieved, and so much promise of a better future, the folly of that is incredible to me.