On Labor Day
One of my great grandfathers, according to family lore anyway, left the Ukraine through his bedroom window in his underwear one winter night with the Czar’s Cossacks, swords drawn, at the front door. He made his way to New York, was one of many who saw scores of young women leap to their deaths in the Triangle Shirt fire, and became one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. It’s possible of course I’m genetically predisposed to feel this way, but I believe that without organized labor, our country could never have achieved the degree of civilization it has today and all of us owe a debt of gratitude to those who fought for it.
Contrary to widely circulated mush, our national holiday of Labor Day wasn’t really created to honor the contributions of American workers. It originated five or six generations ago when people had finally had enough of the brutality of late 19th and early 20th century working conditions and had begun to assert their fundamental human rights to be treated decently. The creation of an end-of-summer paid holiday from work wasn’t an altruistic acknowledgement of that or an attempt to honor the emerging American labor movement. It was, instead, an attempt to appease it. The holiday’s establishment was followed, a week later, by 12,000 federal troops being sent to Chicago to quash a strike against the mostly black workers of the Pullman Railway company, and the violence that followed set the stage for what’s been, on balance, a national policy of labor law and law enforcement that’s been, fundamentally and simply, anti-labor.
Much of the framework of American anti-unionism was codified in the Taft-Hartley act of 1947; in a better modern world, that would have long since seen major revision or repeal. And partly in reflection of such laws and our generally hostile national attitude toward unions, they are in decline. Today only 1 in 10 working Americans are union members, down from 1 in 2 in the 1950’s. More and more of us are working in non-unionized service sector jobs at places like Wal-Mart and McDonalds. These aren’t inherently low-wage jobs, they’re low wage because they’re non-union. What makes things worse for these folks is that minimum wage keeps falling further behind inflation. Two million Americans work full time and remain below the poverty level. But even for those earning more, the income of all Americans, adjusted for inflation, is falling 5% a year. So perhaps it’s not surprising that 1 in 3 AARP members works a paying job, except that, well, they’re supposed to be retired. Just a few examples of the underlying and growing weaknesses in the national job and security picture, but ones we think are worth following more closely.
There are signs that in time organized labor may be able to regain some of its influence, assuming most skilled jobs aren’t exported overseas at our current mind-boggling rate. We think for instance that the recent departure of the SEIU and Teamsters from the AFL-CIO will ultimately prove helpful to the long-term interests of working people in America. And some of the newly emerging union leaders, notably SEIU’s Andrew Stern, are stepping into the political arena with a clarity one rarely hears articulated. Labor however, has a history of that. Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s first president, laid things out very clearly in 1893. Asked by reporters what his movement really wanted, here’s what he said:
“Labor wants more schoolhouses and less jails, more books and less arsenals, more learning and less vice, more constant work and less crime, more justice and less revenge…in fact, more of all the opportunities to cultivate our better natures. “
To that, the only thing we can add is Amen. But it’s hard not to wonder what kind of country we’d be living in if people had had actually heard what he said as clearly as he said it.
Brian Powers, Publisher