Labor Day

(suggested music pairing:  Hot Night, by Me'Shell Ndege'ocello)

According to Wikipedia, Labor Day was created in response to civil unrest related to the Pullman Strike of 1894. The article states, “Following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland reconciled with the labor movement. Fearing further conflict, legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day

In college, my second favorite college course was an elective course titled “Protest Movements Of The 1930’s and 1960’s,” which I took as a pass/fail course. (My favorite course was a Senior Synthesis course, which studied the historical and cultural influences of New Orleans, but I digress.) I took that course to hopefully learn more in detail about the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s; but I found the entire course to be completely fascinating. The course was structured chronologically as an exploration of the American people organizing, advancing, and influencing major social change, starting with the Great Depression, and ending with the anti-Vietnam-War movement. The professor’s general stance was that this four-decade period of history was unique and finite; mass influential protests had not occurred and/or had such a significant influence before that period, or since.  

I actually kept my notes! As mentioned, the course ended with the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements, but the early protests in this period were mainly labor movements. The course began with a setting of the stage - the 1920’s; a time of perceived American prosperity. But underneath this perception was a larger reality; an uneven distribution of wealth between and within economic classes, and general oppression of the working classes in terms of wages and working conditions (such as hours, safety, harassment, etc.) Sounds familiar? The course then moved into the major Labor Movements of the 1930’s, such as the textile industry, the coal industry, the auto industry, and the transportation industry (rail and ship transit, since the trucking and airline industries hadn’t really developed until the 1950’s.) The course then moved into the Pro-War movement during World War II before moving into the Civil Rights Movement.

Without going into a ton of detail (and I would love to), the general theme of all of these movements consists of a large group of disenfranchised people who made individual short-term sacrifices in an attempt to become organized in numbers and in power, to be able to force change. In some cases long-term sacrifices were made, and in a few cases, martyr-istic sacrifices were made. These organized groups were able to protest, make demands, and disrupt their opposition’s ability to succeed, to the point where changes were deemed necessary. And changes were made – better working conditions, better wages, health benefits, and protection from worker abuse.

Somewhat hidden in this, but pointed out the class, is the under-current of socialism within these movements. One of the movements I didn’t mention above, but was studied in this course, was the Anti-Communist movement of the 1950’s, which was positioned in this class as somewhat of a backlash in opposition to the preceding Labor Movements. Socialism in this case is defined more general, as the balance between forced equity versus free-flowing wealth.  Communism would be an extreme example of socialism, of course.  The Democratic Party in general tends to slant towards socialism; the sharing of wealth, social programs, forced/regulated equality; whereas the Republican Party tends to slant away from socialism; less forced/regulated equality, less social programs, freedom of individuality in terms of wealth. I’m pointing this out because the Labor Movements and the Civil Rights Movements were in part successful because the political climate of the 1930’s (the Depression) and the 1960’s (heightened Cold War fears) was largely Democratic in nature, as opposed to the 1920’s and the 1950’s, which was largely Republican in nature and generally perceived to be prosperous.  

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So…what does all this mean today, on Labor Day? 

First, I tend to enjoy exploring the meaning of holidays, and I feel the meaning of Labor Day is generally unknown.

Second, in my opinion, the art of the protest movement is lost.  Working in Downtown Rochester, I’ve seen three protests over the past couple of years:  retirees of Xerox protesting a cut in their retiree benefits, union employees of Frontier Communications (local phone company) protesting upper management bonuses, and a general protest right before the gay marriage bill was passed in New York State. In all cases, the protests generally consisted of a small handful of people (tens, not hundreds), holding picket signs and walking around in a circle, chanting catch phrases. In each case, the protest did draw out the local TV media, but in each case, each event was isolated and did not garner lead story attention. Each protest was generally forgotten within a few minutes of seeing it.  In my opinion, what is lacking is the willingness of the protestors to sacrifice for the cause. The protests of the 1930’s and 1960’s lasted days and weeks, involved thousands and tens of thousands of people who sacrificed themselves, many times giving up their homes, asking for donations to be fed, and all the way up to the tactic of civil disobedience – being willing to go to jail peacefully to state your cause – and beyond.   Is it that conditions aren’t bad enough? Or the protests are over “nice to haves” and not “necessities”?

Third, and finally, being in a white-collar industry, there is a general negative view about Labor Unions. We tend to look at the unions portrayed in the media, which generally is when a union goes on strike, to attempt to protect wages and benefits. We look at that and make a comment along the lines of “why should they get raises when we haven’t gotten anything in three years?”  That is pure jealousy, and to be honest, I believe unions are just as necessary now as they were before.  Maybe not in terms of unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, but there is worker abuse occurring today, even if not overt. Those of us in the white collar world have all faced having to do more with the same gross pay, and with less net pay. My net pay has gone down each of the past three years. My salary has been flat, but benefits have increased each year. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that the cost of standard goods (as in, groceries and gas) has increased each year. And better yet, those of us with salaried jobs, our workdays are getting longer too, just to keep up with the increased workload. This, as many companies are posting increased profits and increasing upper management salaries and bonuses; If there was ever a need for an organized effort to protect the average worked from unfair unemployment just to increase the take-home pay of upper management, it would be now.

And I’ll disclose here that I am racially and emotionally slanted towards the Democratic Party, and slanted towards the generic definition of socialism. But before someone tries to stick me in the Democratic camp, I subscribe to the opinion of Chris Rock stated below, from his stand-up Never Scared:

The whole country's got an f---ed up mentality, man. We all got a gang mentality. Republicans are f---ing idiots, the Democrats are f---ing idiots, conservatives are idiots and liberals are idiots. Anyone that makes up they mind before they hear the issue is an f---ing fool, OK? Everybody...no, everybody's so busy wanting to be down with a gang: "I'm a conservative, I'm a liberal." It's bullsh-t. Be an f---ing person. Listen. Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, OK? I got some sh-t I'm conservative about; I got some sh-t I'm liberal about.”

...so, I’m terms of Corporate America and Capitalism, I lean towards the Democratic, or liberal, or socialistic viewpoint. I know too many people who have been permanently affected, or at least affected for a long time, by being laid-off or living under the threat of being laid-off, who lived paycheck to paycheck while living within their means (myself being one in the mid-90’s), while the companies they all have worked for continue to post profits and their multimillionaire executives are becoming bigger multi-millionaires, but at a much faster rate than before.

And this isn’t to say that all unions are necessary, or successful, or helpful. (Or really that ALL Corporations are bad.)  A union is only as good as its leaders, and a union that doesn’t negotiate in good-faith, or understand that the art of negotiation is in the level of compromise, there have been cases where unions have caused more harm than good. Those examples seem to be highlighted in the media much more often than a successful union, but is that really a surprise?  

When I was 17 and working for the local supermarket, that chain was a unionized chain and I had to be union. I had to pay $7 per week out of my $5-per-hour pay, but I did get a paid one-week vacation using my average weekly hours. The fall of 1989, the teachers’ union at my high school went out on strike for nearly two months, during which I was able to pick up some additional hours. But guess what? The union at work decided to call a strike as well.  About two-thirds of the employees of the store were older, and the remaining one-third were all 21 or under, and we were all expected to picket. For a short while, there were some tense moments between the parents of us high-schoolers and the store union steward, who in my opinion was somewhat out of touch with reality, but in the end, we didn’t have to picket and the strike was only three days. But I do remember the older employees of the store, watching them go through the stress of deciding to strike, and then following through, and all of the factors into making that decision.  And even though at 17, the strike was a joke to us, it wasn’t to them.  

To close, I believe as a society, the importance of Labor Unions in history has been largely forgotten and in some cases distorted, and yet, in the middle of the current economic crisis in this country, Labor Day should be noted as more than just a holiday for the working man and the unofficial end of summer.