Today is Labor Day. It is not a day to mark the end of summer, time to have a BBQ, or a simply a day off of work. First enacted on a federal level in 1894, Labor Day is a day to commemorate the workers of the USA. Not the politicians, not the CEOs, or the owners, but the workers.
The forces of Labor worked for decades, centuries even, to gain the rights and protections that a good society should provide to them: fair pay, safety, retirement, realistic hours, health care, education..and in less than 30 years we, the people, have stripped it all away from them again.
And given the nature of and opinions on protests lately, it should be well remembered the Labor made these gains not by sitting on the sidelines during a national anthem. No, often they made them by protesting loudly, en masse, and in many cases, with violence. Just look up The Battle of Blair Mountain (http://www.pawv.org/news/blairhist.htm) for a case study of workplace protest.
For many years I sided with those who portrayed organized Labor as a scourge of economics and productivity. The issue of pay was all to often the only marker of the discussion. Why did Detroit have to make so much when Japanese workers could make so much less, and by the 90’s were making better products? Using pay as the crutch of the argument, as I often did, vastly missed the point. Europe and Asian company workers, after all, never had to worry about health care, or the price of higher education. Members of the UAW sure as hell did. As automation crept in, and Big Business learned how to move factories overseas, the situation started to get worse and all those gains began to disappear. Reagan’s firing of nearly all air traffic controllers sent a clear signal as well. Union busting would likely be acceptable.
Workers of course face a new type of challenge these days. More and more companies don’t even hire employees. The hire independent contractors. You are completely on your own for benefits and have next to zero rights in a dispute.
So where does this leave us? What hopes do we have for re-gaining our rights as workers here in the USA? What tactics can we use? If we live in a country that provided us with universal health care, with education through college paid for and EQUAL access for everyone in both of these categories, we could certainly get buy with less in terms on financial compensation.
We have much to think about on this, the 122nd official Labor Day. If we are to avoid lapsing into a caste society, we had better start thinking.