Thoughts on Labor Day

 This is the Sunday of the 2022 Labor Day weekend. The labor movement is once again stirring after going into the doldrums starting in the late 1970s. A few thoughts came to mind as I opened my laptop today.

The first is that what we see today in the United States has been built over the centuries by the working men and women of this country. While some praise the work of the (primarily) men who provided the capital for business, we must never forget that we would not have what we see today without the workers. From the early canals like the Erie to the railroads that opened this vast country to commerce in the late 18th and early 20th centuries and the steel and petroleum industries that led to the automotive industry, names like Clinton, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford readily come to mind. As with military history, this is remembering the generals and forgetting the soldiers. 

The labor movement’s history is long in our country. It is checkered with many episodes of violence where the businessmen fought it in the courts but also with guns and violence. The history of the labor movement is also told primarily as the history of white men, just like the history of capital. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project makes a case for the slavocracy born in colonial America as a point in the birth of American capitalism, especially with the rise of cotton production which led to a boom in factories (more workers) in New England and financiers in New York City. The slaves on those plantations (now referred to as slave labor camps) are the unheralded workers who built the early United States. They included men, women, and children. 

The roles of women and children are also often overlooked in celebrating Labor Day. It was not until 1938 that the federal government, with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) finally regulated minimum ages and hours of work. Women in the working force have made progress but there is much yet to do to close pay inequality for them. 

When I was in college, I worked summers at the Glidden Plant in Reading, PA. That plant is now long gone, torn down for development. But it was a great job in the 1960s for a college student, with good wages and I purchased an electric Smith Corona Marchant typewriter at cost as a side benefit. I was a union member and my father, also a union member, took some pride in that. I hope the recent trend of reinvigoration of the labor movement continues. We are a wealthy country and unions after World War II were a major reason we had a vibrant middle class. In my mind, we are better off with a vibrant middle class than a bunch of plutocrats scheming with a corrupt bunch of politicians in an attempt to make us a nation governed by an authoritarian (dare I say fascist?) government. Okay, call me a socialist. Just don’t call me late for lunch. Happy Labor Day to all.