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Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Some Thoughts on Labor Day

Today is our celebration of the Labor Movement and the value of the workers who built and continue to maintain America. As a holiday, it has an interesting political history and looking at the 127 years it has been celebrated we see stark changes that have been made in the relationship between the government and labor.

As I have for the last few Labor Days, I am thinking about what happened in the U.S.A, and how our economy has changed since my younger days.  In recent years (the last quarter century) the power of the Labor Movement has been so considerably weakened that our economy has become a disaster for the ordinary worker and an outrageous success for the 1% or less of the richest Americans… and we can attach the downward swirl of labor to the Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

“Republican presidents never have had much regard for unions, which almost invariably have opposed their election. But until Reagan, no GOP president had dared to challenge labor’s firm legal standing, gained through Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the mid-1930s.” – Dick Meister, who co-authored a history of farm labor,

“A Long Time Coming,” published by Macmillan.

Reagan, oddly enough, had been a union president, head of the Screen Actors’ Guild. Meister points out that:

“…he was notoriously pro-management, leading the way to a strike-ending agreement in 1959 that greatly weakened the union and finally resigning under membership pressure before his term ended.

————–

Reagan gave dedicated union foes direct control of the federal agencies that were designed originally to protect and further the rights and interests of workers and their unions.”

As President of the United States, Reagan’s major labor action was breaking the PATCO strike in 1981. By destroying the air Traffic Controllers’ union, Reagan sent (according to Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson)

“an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers, and employers got that message loud and clear — illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad.”

Reagan’s major move was to elevate the “wealth creators”(ie: the top corporate level ownership and management) well above the working class (ie: the rest of us). The fact that he did this with the incredible support of the labor class he was eventually weakening is amazing.

Today’s Salon has an interesting article on the relationship of the two classes and the results that legislation has made:

“The wealth creators, according to the conservative press, are constantly being threatened from above by government, which seeks to destroy wealth by taxation, and from below by workers, particularly those organized into unions, who threaten to destroy wealth by insisting that capitalists share a decent amount of their profits with employees. The entire basis of conservative “trickle-down” economics is the idea that the economy will grow faster if the supposed wealth creators keep more of the profits of private enterprise, with less going to taxes and worker compensation.

If you believe this theory, then Labor Day should be a cause for national mourning. We should all pause to mourn the loss of capital that might have gone to a fifth or a sixth mansion or a private jet, but instead was conscripted against its will to pay for a public school or higher wages in a factory.”

This is a different view of the labor/capital relationship than what was present in 1882 when Labor Day originated. According to the U.S. Dept. of Labor, the first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City.

Some records show that Peter J. McGuire, general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, was first in suggesting a day to honor those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.”

But Peter McGuire’s place in Labor Day history has not gone unchallenged. Many believe that Matthew Maguire, a machinist, not Peter McGuire, founded the holiday. Recent research seems to support the contention that Matthew Maguire, later the secretary of Local 344 of the International Association of Machinists in Paterson, N.J., proposed the holiday in 1882 while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York. What is clear is that the Central Labor Union adopted a Labor Day proposal and appointed a committee to plan a demonstration and picnic.

The importance of labor goes back even further to Lincoln’s administration. Lincoln stated in his campaign for the presidency that:

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not existed.”

So, you see that one of the earliest Republicans had a view of labor that differs greatly from Reagan, or Bush 1 or 2.

The Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, and subsequent labor conflicts in mines and other places which brought out both police and US soldiers to battle laborers, led to the official designation of the Labor Day holiday in 1894. In a feature on the Origins of Labor Day, PBS points out that:

In the aftermath of the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the US military and US Marshals during the 1894 Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with Labor as a top political priority. 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.

Brendan Koerner, in a Slate article, says why Labor Day was set as the first Monday in September, instead of on May 1st, which had become the worker’s day in Europe:

Cleveland was also concerned that aligning a US labor holiday with existing international May Day celebrations would stir up negative emotions linked to the Haymarket Affair.

And, of course, May Day was and is associated primarily with Socialism and Communism in our country, the two “isms” which conservative administrations and current Republican competition with the existing government has made into dirty words.

So here we are at this point in time, getting a day off from work, attending parades and picnics (mine is down at Morgan Grove Park in Shepherdstown this afternoon) and no longer really celebrating the dynamics of labor that made us a successful country in the fifties, sixties and seventies. I hope you have a good one.

Under The LobsterScope


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/ 36 Comments

36 comments

  1. Jjc2008

    unions hurting people has been spun on a regular basis since Reagan.  My nephews, who came of age in the 80s, neither of whom ever worked for a union, love to spin tales of how unions won’t allow anyone to change a light bulb.  

    My father was a cop from the 1940s to the 1970s.  Poor pay; working conditions mediocre.  FOP raised money for fallen cops. My father was pretty apolitical because while our town was a union town, it was sitting in the middle of a mostly republican county where wealth and power resided.  The poor immigrants were concentrated in my town and the next one which surrounded the steel mills, paper mills, textile mills.  Surrounding us was the lush and rich areas of the main line of Philly where the mill owners lived.  

    My mother worked in one of the textile mills that employed mostly women, mostly immigrant women who had little or no education. While my mother toiled in what I considered a non-union sweat shop for years, most of my uncles worked in the steel mill or the tire mill.  They all did well. My mother’s measly income supported my father’s poor cop pay.  My first year of teaching I was making twice as much as mother and more than my father did after 20 years on the force.   And teachers were not making good salaries then.

    Eventually someone tried to unionize the textile workers. I remember my mother going to meetings, having one meeting at our house and telling my sister and I not to tell people her work friends were coming over.  I did not understand it then. I do now.  I remember once getting to pick my mom up from work after I turned 16 and could drive.  Before that, my mother mostly took the bus to work unless my dad could take her, depending on his shift.  She always had told us to wait in the car for her.  But I was curious so one time I was early and decided I wanted to see what she did.  It left a lasting impression.  It was in the late summer, it was hot outside and when I walked into the factory, a wall of even worse heat hit me. I saw machines and sweaty women and a “floor man” yelling at them.  My mother saw me and she got to me fast.  “I told you to not come in here.”  She was angry and upset with me.   I don’t think she wanted me to see her working conditions, and the way women were demeaned and denigrated for a pittance.  Sadly the attempt to unionize failed; the mill closed and moved to the south sometime in the early to middle 1960s.

    In many ways, that framed my view of labor.   I remember seeing the movie “Norma Rae” and crying.  My mother had died before that, an early death in her fifties. I don’t know that young people have a clue as to how unions changed the quality of life for people like my family; first and second generation families who had come to America for a better life, who were willing to work hard so their children could get an education.   I find it sad that so many thirty something kids have come to see unions in the negative light that the media has spun since Reagan.

    When I was a little girl, Labor Day was a big deal. Parades honoring working people.  Now, not so much.

  2. hubiestubert

    that because I am a Republican, that I am anti-union.

    The two often seem to go together.  And the problem seems to lie in the area that unions are somehow Un-American.  That in order to be pro-union, you have to hate America.  

    Which is a load of horse hockey.

    Unions helped this nation bridge gaps that naked capitalism and the Robber Barons of old created.  So long as you have the right to assemble freely, and to speak freely, then unions are hardly un-American. Unions are a natural outgrowth of our market economy.  Business owners have the ability to get together in association to discuss and strategize how to build their respective markets.  You see them all the time, when you pass the Chamber of Commerce.  Unions are an outgrowth of the same system, and so long as management and owners can get together to discuss how to deal with economic necessities, then workers likewise have an obligation to do so, to look out for their own rights.

    And the IWW and other boisterously defended the rights of the workers.  Our labor movement was an uproarious and contentious sort of thing. The Wobblies favored techniques to organization that were often contentious, but effective, and with great humor leavening that.  And opposed by those who felt that workers didn’t have the right to associate freely, or question their wages and conditions.

    It reminds me of how Plato and Aristotle both thought the Battle of Salamis was the downfall of the Greek polis.  Back in the days of the Persian Empire, Xerxes came a knocking across the Hellespont with the largest fleet then known to man.  And these were the early heady days of the Greek experiment with democracy.  Not only was a defense organized by Themistocles, assembling the Athenian fleet, but crewed by landless freemen.  These oarsmen made the difference, and the Persian fleet was crushed by the outnumbered Greeks, and in return for their service, those freemen demanded a bigger piece of the pie. In many ways, the seeds of our own self interested capitalism were sown on that battlefield as well.

    Plato bemoaned how the polis gave up their ideals on that battlefield, yet those free oarsmen, by staying organized, forced the polis to make concessions to them, and the demos was forever altered.  And in doing so, gave rise even to capitalism itself, not as a system of wealth accrual by the landed gentry, but the ability of the workers and the common folk to pursue their own work, and be rewarded for it, and retain the right to govern and shape society as their labor was worth the franchise.

    The seeds of our labor movement go that far back, and are intimately tied to the vision of democracy.  Intimately tied to economic power and the idea that labor deserves compensation.  Without those organized laborers, the Greek experiment would have died under the heel of the Persians, and even our science, history, and philosophy would have been extinguished.

    So, how can I complain about workers organizing as being a horrible thing, when they are fulfilling the promise of our democracy?  

    Raise a glass you bastiches to the men and women who helped keep our system lively, strong, and very much in keeping with the principles of our democracy, and very much American as well.

  3. Jjc2008

    this:

    “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Louis D. Brandeis (Supreme Court Judge) …

    I truly believe that unions helped spread the wealth and thus the landed gentry, the robber barons, the nobility resented this.   Slave labor of course accounted for the rise of plantation owners.  No surprise they fought a war against abolition.  Paying workers certainly would cut in to their wealth.  Unions of course then made sure not only would workers be paid, but that they would be paid fairly, have a fair time off, have safe conditions, have health care.

    I believe that the unions played a huge part in the expansion of the middle class.  

    I know you say you are a republican.  It is hard for me to put republican and union supporter together.  I have yet to meet one republican in recent years who supports the notion of unions.  You sir, strike me as unique.

  4. Jjc2008

    especially with this:

    Ultimately, a union is only as good as their rank and file demand them to be. And if you have a lazy rank and file, you are going to have a lazy union, and one that will cut corners and not necessarily look out for the interests of the largest section of their members.

    For me, unions are like small democracies.  Good unions are good because the members participate and work hard. Democracies work when the citizenry participate and work at it.

    When I was our teachers’ union rep, if a teacher wanted to preach to me why they wouldn’t join, claiming they did not like this or that, I would say, “Then come to the meetings, be a rep, work for change. That’s how democracy works.”   What I found is that those people refused to do so.  They preferred an authoritarian world where the good kind boss/president/whomever knows the right thing, does the right thing and that’s that.  It’s sad to me that people honestly believe that.

  6. Hollede

    and letting Labor know how they have changed America for the better.

    And he just started talking about how he has improved things over the past 7 months.

    And is reminding us of the bad ole days…

  9. Hollede

    a public option will help improve bringing down cost.

    could have been stronger.

    But he addressing every single criticism from the anti health care reform idiots.  

  10. John Allen

    have bought into the anti-union meme. My grandfather was one of the sit-down strikers in Flint, Michigan that finally succeeded in unionizing the auto industry. My mother and her younger sister carried food and drink to the striking workers and handed it to them through the windows. Those were heady days.

    My father was in management. He was fairly anti-union for the same reasons that Chris talks about. However, he wasn’t against unions. He was against the bad practices that unions can encourage. He was well aware that management itself had its own bad practices that unions counter-balanced.

    For myself, I started working when I turned 16 in 1963. My first job was working for a grocery store. It was unionized. I worked there until I turned 18 and then went to work for GM. I worked for GM for a grand total of 10 months before I realized I wanted more out of life than a job in the auto plants. I went back to the grocery chain, because of the flexible hours and started going to college. I stayed there for a few years and then found myself back at GM where I worked at hourly and management jobs for the next 20 years before finally breaking free.

    Both places I worked were unionized. The retail workers union that represented the grocery workers was a great union. Times were good and the labor market was competitive for business so our union negotiated contracts that put us on a par with autoworkers pay and benefits. That is hard to believe today when you see workers at places like Walmart making minimum wage without benefits. The retail workers union never took us out on strike. They didn’t go out of their way to protect bad workers, but they wouldn’t let bad managers run over the workers either. We were all well aware of the disiplinary process and had few problems.

    The UAW was a different matter. I was an elected rep for awhile and saw the union work from the inside. A large part of union activities was centered around protecting the union hierarchy. Politics came into everything. Incumbencies were the order of the day. Many committeemen and shop committee members had held office for 20 years or more. They had perks that they protected with the fierceness of a mother bear protecting its cubs.

    Another negative about the UAW was how they protected bad workers. We, committeemen, were expected to protect the jobs of alcoholics and deadbeats. That led to horsetrading that hurt the general union membership for the benefit of people that should have been fired.

    We also had a lot of problems caused by protecting job classifications. Most of this centered around skilled trades. If a line broke down no one could fix it except millwrights. A broken machine required calling a machine repairman. Line supervisors were not allowed to do any union work. If a foreman, who usually managed 20-30 line workers, tried to fill in for a late or missing worker in order to get the line going at the start of a shift then every worker would call the committeeman to file a grievance. This type of activism led to avoidable downtime that costs thousands of dollars on a daily basis.

    So, yes, unions can have negative effects on production. However, their benefits far outweigh their negatives. Some doctors are less competent than other doctors. Some need to lose their licenses. But do we want to get rid of all doctors because some cause problems? Hell, no. The same should apply to unions. If there are problems inherent in current union practices then those practices should be reformed and regulated.

    It is no coincidence that the golden age for the middle-class in this country was also the golden age for unions. Nor is it a surprise that wealth and income inequity has grown during the years since the war on unions was started by Reagan.

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