Our New Look

Over the next few weeks, you're gonna notice a change to some of the look and feel of the site. This of course starts today with out new logo.

Yep, it's true, we now have a logo.

Rosie is probably the most visible and easily understood part of this logo, but you might be wondering a little about the Eagle to the right. This is the "Blue Eagle" (Yeah, I know it's Black on the screen). This symbol comes to us by way of the New Deal. Businesses that met certain minimum standards were issued and could display the eagle. US News and World Reports did a little digging on this a few years back:

FDR's badge of honor went to any company or consumer pledging support for his National Recovery Administration, an ambitious scheme to revive ailing industries through government-planned scarcity. In the summer and fall of 1933, Americans displayed the Blue Eagle almost everywhere--on factory walls, in store windows, on commercial products, on windshields, in homes, even on the bare thighs of Atlantic City beauty queens. To the step of "Happy Days Are Here Again," a quarter-million New Yorkers paraded down Fifth Avenue in a 10-hour salute to the symbolic bird.

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For workers, the codes would establish minimum wages (such as $13 a week for a cotton-mill worker in the North, $12 for one in the South), ceilings on hours (in many instances, 35 hours a week for blue-collar workers and 44 hours for white-collar employees), and the right to form unions and bargain with management. Among consumers, the "good American" would boycott businesses that failed to show the eagle. New Dealers envisioned millions of new jobs "before the snow flies."

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As a recovery tool, the NRA proved a massive flop. But the Blue Eagle laid a few worthy eggs. It curbed the deflationary spiral that had nearly wrecked the country. It energized a long-suppressed drive to organize labor. It virtually eliminated child labor. And it helped make five days, not six, America's prevailing workweek.

The Blue Eagle is a remnant of American history. A snapshot in time when the government of Franklin D Roosevelt sought to coordinate Employers and Employees into working together to grow the economy, ensure a minimum wage and eliminate child labor. As it also grew the labor movement, it's now a part of our site.

Yeah for the New Deal and the Blue Eagle.