See other articles by Stephen Lendman:     
The War on Working Americans - Part I    [
The War on Working Americans - Part II    [

Also see below:     
Labor Day's Significance Gets Overlooked    [

    Labor Day Hypocrisy
    By Stephen Lendman
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Monday 03 September 2007

    Labor Day has been commemorated on the first Monday in September each year since the first one was celebrated in New York in 1882. Around the world outside the US, socialist and labor movements are observed on May 1 to recognize organized labor's social and economic achievements and the workers in them. This day gets scant attention in the US, but where it's prominent it's common to remember the Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886, in Chicago. It followed the city's May 1 general strike for an eight-hour day that led to violence breaking out on the Fourth.

    Labor Day became a national federal holiday when Congress passed legislation for it in June 1894 at a time when working people had few rights, management had the upper hand, only wanted to exploit workers for profit, and got away with it. It took many painful years of organizing, taking to the streets, going on strike, holding boycotts, battling police and National Guard forces, and paying with their blood and lives before real gains were won. They got an eight-hour day, a living wage, on-the-job benefits and the pinnacle of labor's triumph in the 1930s with the passage of the landmark Wagner Act establishing the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It guaranteed labor the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management for the first time ever.

    All of it was won [by action at] the grass-roots level. Management gave nothing until forced to, and neither did government. It always sides with business, never yielding a thing unless threatened with disruptive work stoppages or possible insurrection. All this is in a democracy that claims to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people - most of whom are ordinary working-class ones.

    Since a worried Congress passed the 1935 Wagner Act during the Great Depression, the state of organized labor declined, especially post-WW II. The decline accelerated precipitously during the Reagan years under an administration openly hostile to worker rights in its one-sided support for management. It continued unabated under Republican and Democratic administrations, and today stands at a multi-generational low.

    Under George Bush, conditions got much worse. Since coming into office in 2001, he sided with management openly on policies to strip workers of their right to organize and bargain for a living wage and essential benefits. He hired anti-union officials, denied millions overtime pay, cut pay raises for 1.8 million federal workers - claiming a "national emergency" - and schemed to end Social Security as we know it by plotting (unsuccessfully so far) to let Wall Street sharks take it over.

    Since labor's ascendency decades earlier, corporate America, in league with government, shamelessly denigrated unions and the rights of working people in unions. In 1958, 34.7 percent of the work force was unionized, but now the figure is around 12 percent overall, with only 7.4 percent in the private sector - the lowest it's been in seven decades.

    Even worse, most jobs are low-pay service sector positions because the nation's manufacturing base and many higher-paying jobs in finance and technology have been offshored to low-wage developing nations. Workers there can be hired for a fraction of the pay scales here, or as virtual serfs at below-poverty wages as low as $2 a day or less and with no benefits. Companies fill legions of sweatshop factory jobs in countries prohibiting unions and fair worker standards, [piling] Wal-Mart's "Always low prices" on the backs of ruthlessly exploited working people.

    Nonetheless, on the first Monday each September, this nation "remembers" working Americans with a federally mandated holiday in their "honor." Who's celebrating, when it's disingenuously commemorated at a time worker rights are threatened, ignored, forgotten and uncared about by heartless governments beholden to capital. They scorn working people who are no longer as deceived with meaningless bread and circus droppings at the expense of what they need most: good jobs at good pay, essential benefits, job security and a government on their side doing what counts most - supporting their rights with worker-friendly legislation.

    Workers are reminded every day that backing like that is off the table by governments shamelessly mocking their day. It's commemorated in name only by a nation beholden to capital, the corporate giants controlling it, and the best democracy their money can buy for them alone.

    Go to Original

    Labor Day's Significance Gets Overlooked
    By Diane Stafford and Randolph Heaster
    The Kansas City Star

    Sunday 02 September 2007

    Months before September, Kansas City labor unions each year put out the call for entries in the annual Labor Day parade.

    Union members always respond. Floats, front loaders and Fords travel for a few blocks in front of family and fellow union members. Today's local festivities culminate with a picnic at the Liberty Memorial.

    Most of the rest of the area's population finds something else to do. Some go to the lake. Some shop. Some simply mow the lawn and crack open a beer.

    For most, the Labor Day holiday simply doesn't pack the emotional punch of the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving.

    For most, it's just a summer bookend to Memorial Day, another observation that means much to a few but not many.

    Robert Davis, who has worked at Clay & Bailey Manufacturing Co. for nearly 11 years, will spend today helping celebrate his brother's birthday. Although Davis won't be participating in any Labor Day-related events, he said he understands the holiday's significance.

    "It's a working man's holiday," said Davis, a furnace operator and member of the United Steelworkers of America. "You appreciate a day like that. I'll be relaxing and getting ready for the workweek."

    But the typical American doesn't spend much time these days thinking about Labor Day's reason for being. He or she doesn't dwell on organized labor's role in pushing for a living wage, the 40-hour workweek, employer-provided health-care coverage and workplace safety.

    In fact, as the once-pervasive influence of organized labor continues to ebb, some worry that Labor Day has lost relevance for the masses. They hope it finds renewed meaning in a slightly different context.

    "The day should be for the recognition of the nation's number one resource, and that's workers in general," said Garry Kemp, business manager of the Greater Kansas City Building & Construction Trades Council.

    "It's not a union-or-nonunion issue. As the ranks of organized labor continue to dwindle, there is less recognition of labor because it's the union movement that has carried that banner. We now need others to recognize our most important resource - which is skilled workers."

    Glorious Past

    Labor Day was a holiday conceived in 1882, at a meeting of the Central Labor Union in New York City.

    At the time, the average American worker worked 12-hour days, six and sometimes seven days a week. There were no watchdog agencies dedicated to worker safety or worker rights.

    It actually took Congress 12 years after that 1882 union meeting to declare an official Labor Day holiday. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland, himself no fan of organized labor, signed it into law.

    The nation's first Labor Day observance was held in Detroit, attracting about 50,000 people - labor members and observers.

    It didn't take long, though, for tired workers (even ardent union members) to use the holiday to rest rather than march. By 1900, accounts tell of unions fining their members for not participating in official Labor Day programs.

    Union power coalesced a second time in the depths of the Great Depression. Strikes became an effective tool to campaign for higher wages and job security. It was then, in the 1930s, that many of the federal worker-protection laws were born.

    Agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration emerged to monitor what, in some opinions, became a confusing plethora of workplace laws.

    Mandatory employer taxes to help support workers who were injured or disabled on the job and to help finance workers' retirements also became part of the business landscape.

    By the 1950s, nearly half of all U.S. workers belonged to unions. From the late 1930s through the early 1970s, the labor movement was truly robust.

    But in recent years, the power of labor has waned. According to federal statistics, only 12 percent of U.S. workers now are covered by collective bargaining agreements.

    And if government employees aren't included in the mix, the percentage of workers in the private work force who are union members plummets to 7 percent.

    A former U.S. labor secretary, Robert Reich, traces organized labor's decline to President Ronald Reagan's firing of the unionized air traffic controllers in the early 1980s and the "greed is good" mantra popularized in that decade.

    "But don't blame Ronald Reagan or corporate greed," Reich wrote in his recent "What Happened to Labor Day?" blog entry. "Blame us - you and me ...

    "We as a nation have traded off lower-priced goods and services in place of a unionized work force with the bargaining clout to get higher wages. So now, a lot of us get good consumer deals and lousy paychecks."

    Many younger workers today don't know anyone who belongs to a union, and, unless they studied the labor movement in school, have no idea how labor won its day.

    And they have no idea how many of the rights they take for granted were due to organized labor.

    Uncertain Future

    The decline of union membership suits some workers and managers just fine. They prefer a freer market system where individuals are hired and paid on their perceived individual merit.

    Others look at comparative income tables and note that in an "at will" employment economy, earnings pale for nonunion members compared with union members.

    In 2006, for example, full-time wage and salary workers who were union members had median usual weekly earnings of $833, compared with a median of $642 for workers who were not represented by unions.

    Kemp said the challenges of the global economy call for U.S. employers and government leaders to work together to focus more on U.S. worker education and training.

    "Our ability to compete in global markets is dependent on our skilled work force, and I believe we will begin facing major shortages in the number of skilled workers we have in the coming years," he said.

    Whether workers and management view each other as adversaries or allies in that war for talent, democracy allows "the idea of workers joining together to have a say in what goes on in their workplace," said Clete Daniel, professor of American labor history at Cornell University.

    "Even in a time when union membership is declining, that idea is still present in many workers' minds," Daniel said.

    "We've had this ideological wall of opposition to the idea of workplace democracy for decades now. But unions like the SEIU and UNITE HERE are having success convincing some of our lowest-paid workers to join. There's something about relationships in the workplace that people intuitively understand the way to make things better is to have an equal role in saying what's fair."

    For Daniel, that's why Labor Day will never lose its meaning.

    "For some part of the working class, it's a holiday that is symbolic of all their hopes," he said.