The Bangladeshi garment factory whose collapse has cost 300 lives and counting never gained approval from the local development authority. In the days leading up to the collapse, with the building exhibiting deep cracks, police ordered owners to evacuate the building and workers fled to the streets. But the building’s owner told reporters the cracks were “nothing serious” and stood outside the building with a megaphone, reportedly warning workers they would be docked pay if they didn’t return to work.

The fire is one of a spate of incidents at Bangladeshi garment factories in recent months that have led to deaths and injuries. But even after a fire in November that killed 112 workers, clothing brands and retailers that include Wal-Mart, Gap, and H&M refused to implement a new union-proposed safety plan. The Associated Press reports:

The plan would ditch government inspections, which are infrequent and easily subverted by corruption, and establish an independent inspectorate to oversee all factories in Bangladesh, with powers to shut down unsafe facilities as part of a legally binding contract signed by suppliers, customers and unions. The inspections would be funded by contributions from the companies of up to $500,000 per year.

The proposal was presented at a 2011 meeting in Dhaka attended by more than a dozen of the world’s largest clothing brands and retailers — including Wal-Mart, Gap and Swedish clothing giant H&M — but was rejected by the companies because it would be legally binding and costly.

At the time, Wal-Mart’s representative told the meeting it was “not financially feasible … to make such investments,” according to minutes of the meeting obtained by The Associated Press.

After last year’s Tazreen blaze, Bangladeshi union president Amin said he and international labor activists renewed a push for the independent inspectorate plan, but none of the factories or big brands would agree.

This week, none of the large clothing brands or retailers would comment about the proposal.

Over the past several years, corporations have touted their in-house social responsibility programs as an alternative to binding agreements on working conditions, but these self-monitoring programs implement measures that are neither sufficient to fill huge regulatory gaps in an industry with 3 million workers, nor transparent enough to ensure compliance.

Retailers reap extraordinary savings from siting their garment factories in countries like Bangladesh, with miniscule wages and little compliance expense, casting doubt on their claims that stepped up oversight is not “financially feasible.” Some 100 years ago, a New York garment factory fire in which some 150 young women and teens jumped to their deaths sparked labor reform in the United States. But mega-corporations continue to skirt those reforms by simply moving to new and less developed countries without regulations, which poses particular hazards in the labor-intensive textile industry. In part, these clothiers are responding to U.S. demand for cheap clothing in a culture built on “fast fashion.” At the turn of the century, the average affordable clothing item cost around $8, or $380 adjusted for inflation, and by 1929, most women still only owned nine work outfits. Today, most Americans expect to own much more for much less.

On Monday, America celebrated Labor Day, which is set aside to honor American laborers and their unions. Yet a new report from the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) Albert Shanker Institute titled “American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story is Distorted in High School History Textbooks” finds that America’s high school students are not being properly taught about the contributions of organized labor to American history.

The Shanker Institute report surveyed four high school textbooks — The American Vision, American History, The Americans, and American Anthem — published by major publishers that make up a “significant” portion of the American textbook market and found serious deficiencies in the coverage of labor unions. Here are some highlights from the report:

- The Role Of Unions In Winning Broad Social Protections Is Overlooked: The textbooks surveyed failed to record the history of American unions using their political clout to win social protections for all Americans. This overlooked advocacy includes activism on behalf of the “Progressive Era and New Deal reforms, such as the Social Security Act of 1935, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.”

- The Role Of American Labor In Battling Human Rights Abuses Abroad Is Ignored: The report notes that the textbooks surveyed failed to mention the “the important role that the American labor movement played in support of the establishment of free and democratic trade unions in post-war Western Europe.” They also ignored the role that unions played in allying with the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa or “numerous other efforts to support free and democratic unions as a bulwark against totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.”

- Labor’s Role In Winning Civil Rights Is Ignored: One of the major omissions of these textbooks is overlooking the role that unions played in the civil rights movement. The contributions of labor leaders to these movements are ignored, and the labor advocacy conducted by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is barely covered. There is no mention in any of the textbooks, for example, that AFL-CIO president George Meany paid $160,000 in 1963 for bail to release King and 2,000 other civil rights demonstrators from jail.

- Anti-Union Behavior By Employers Is Glossed Over: The report finds that the textbooks largely ignore the “history of aggressive and at times violent anti-union behavior by employers.” These abuses are “neither addressed as a significant legal problem nor is it analyzed as a serious denial of First Amendment rights.” For example, The Americans praises Andrew Carnegie’s and John D. Rockefeller’s business successes but fails to note their anti-union behavior.

- Major Strikes Are Misrepresented: Historic strikes are “treated as costly failures, as violent, as lacking public support and backfiring against unions.” The “role [of the employer] in provoking strikes through prolonged, unrelenting worker abuse, and employers’ attempts to suppress strikes, often through illegal and violent means, are glossed over.” For example, American Anthem praises Reagan’s firing of PATCO workers, calling it “decisive.”

The report concludes with a set of recommendations for text book publishers. Included among these is including sections on unionism past the 1960′s, which is very lightly covered, and presenting unionism as a basic right.

Today is Labor Day, a federally recognized holiday that most Americans likely think of as a well-deserved day off. Labor Day was first celebrated in the late 1880′s as labor activists from the American Federation of Labor (which later formed part of the basis for the AFL-CIO) and other unions rallied around a day to celebrate organized labor and to take a day off. In 1887 Oregon started a formal “Labor Day” and by 1897 President Glover Cleveland made it a federal holiday, reacting to pressure from unions following the contentious Pullman Strike.

On this day that is set aside to celebrate the American laborer, Americans should recall the many benefits that organized labor have provided our country:

1. Unions Gave Us The Weekend: Even the ultra-conservative Mises Institute notes that the relatively labor-free 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.

2. Unions Helped End Child Labor: “Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organization’s like the “National Consumers’ League” and the National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.

3. Unions Won Widespread Employer-Based Health Coverage: “The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”

4. Unions Spearheaded The Fight For The Family And Medical Leave Act: Labor unions like the AFL-CIO federation led the fight for this 1993 law, which “requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave annually for workers to care for a newborn, newly adopted child, seriously ill family member or for the worker’s own illness.”

And yet, despite the many benefits unions have provided the United States, right-wing politicians and business interests have for years sought to undermine the ability of Americans to organize to demand better pay, benefits, and conditions. From the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act to the recent GOP-led efforts to kill public worker collective bargaining rights, these assaults have successfully decreased union membership over time. In the prosperous 1950′s, nearly one in three Americans was in a union. Today, it is closer to one in ten.

This has had a deterimental effect on the American middle class. As the following chart from CAP’s David Madland and Karla Waters demonstrates, as union membership fell from the 1970′s to the present, the middle class’s share of national income fell as well:

But Americans do not have to allow the assault on unions to succeed and the middle class to decline. As Wisconsin taught the nation, when people come together and organize, they can help beat back the attack on Main Street America. As you enjoy Labor Day today, think about what you can do to help the same labor unions that brought you the weekend, health care coverage, strong wages, and a robust middle class. One great place to start is to help campaigns like We Are Ohio, which is working to repeal the anti-labor law pass by Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) in Ohio.