"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Matthew 11:28
Consider the following definition of labor: production of raw materials, as in mining and agriculture; manufacturing or transformation of raw materials into objects serviceable to man; distribution, or transference of useful objects from one place to another, as determined by human needs; operations involved in the management of production, such as accounting and secretarial work; the service sector, including wholesaling, retailing and vending; professional trades such as carpentry, computer programming, performing arts, professional sports, and the sciences; and personal services such as those rendered by physicians, teachers, and waitresses.
Agitation for the recognition of Labor Day was begun by the Knights of Labor in 1882. The Knights of Labor hoped to gain their ends through politics and education rather than through economic coercion. The Knights strongly promoted their version of republicanism that stressed the centrality of free labor, preaching harmony and cooperation among workers and owners. On June 28th, 1894 Congress passed a Bill making the first Monday in September a legal holiday throughout the Union.
The form for the observance of Labor Day was outlined in the first proposal of the holiday: A street parade to exhibit to the public "the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations," followed by a festival for the workers and their families. Speeches by prominent men and women were introduced later, as more emphasis was placed upon the civil significance of the holiday. Today, celebrations include rallies, picnics and cookouts, parades, speeches, and athletic and sporting events. Labor Day signifies summer's last hurrah and the return to business as usual. By Labor Day, the kids are back in school, football season is in gear, and the glorious fall and winter festivals hearken.
But in the true spirit of profit never taking a holiday, to take advantage of large numbers of potential customers free to shop, Labor Day has become an important sales weekend for many retailers in the United States. Some retailers claim it is one of the largest sale dates of the year, second only to the Christmas season's Black Friday. Ironically, because of the importance of the sale weekend, those who are employed in the retail sector not only work on Labor Day, but work longer hours. More Americans work in the retail industry than any other, with retail employment making up 24% of all jobs in the United States.
Perhaps most importantly, Labor Day is considered the last day of the year when it is fashionable to wear white.
This country was built upon Herculean feats. The building of dams, interstates, skyscrapers, aqueducts, levees, and telegraph lines, involved almost unimaginable engineering and labor. These monumental achievements may best be symbolized by the joining of the Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869, and the driving of the Golden Spike.
Unfortunately, the entire history of mankind has been a war on labor. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, slavery was institutionalized. The "Dark Ages" were marked by indentured servitude under the feudal system. Much of early American commerce was based on slave labor, in both the southern AND northern colonies. After the Civil War, imported labor from China, and immigrant labor from Ireland, were used for the backbreaking and dangerous jobs of manifest destiny. After the turn of the century, attempts to unionize for better wages and safer working conditions were met with brutal reprisals and firings, and strikes were broken by police and professional strikebreakers from the Pinkerton Detective Agency, with many horrible injuries and great loss of life.
As the new century unfolded, the greed of the "robber barons," the excesses of the stock market, and the devastation of the dust bowl, converged to create the perfect financial storm that plunged America into the Great Depression. The collapse was so deep that it took a world war to pull the country out. With the aid of the G.I. Bill, the battle-hardened veterans got college educations and vocational training and went into business. These returning soldiers were backed up by wives and girlfriends who had held down the homefront by working in factories and raising families as single parents. The incredible war industry was turned to producing consumer goods such as automobiles, refrigerators, and televisions. The American Dream and middle-class were born.
This new working middle-class fueled an economic engine unparalleled in human history. Unionized labor won such concessions as a five day workweek, an eight hour workday, paid vacations, and benefits such as health care and retirement pensions. The next three and a half decades would mark the heyday of the unions. In the early 1950's, around a third of the United States' total labor force was unionized; by 2012, the proportion was 10%, falling to 5% for the private sector. Over the last few decades, unions' influence has waned and workers' collective voice in the political process has weakened. Partly as a result, wages have stagnated and income inequality has skyrocketed.
The change was ushered in when a former actor, Republican Governor of California, and staunch anti-labor ideologue, was swept into the White House. Ronald W. Reagan became President, when he was sworn into office on Tuesday January 20th, 1981. Now the business of America was first and foremost -- Business. The wealth of the planet would be mined and consolidated into the hands of the few, and the rest of us could live on the "trickle down" of the vastly rich and powerful.
More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions. When Reagan fired nearly 13,000 air traffic controllers after they refused to call off an "illegal" strike, Ronald Reagan not only transformed his presidency, but also shaped the world of the modern workplace.
Air travel was significantly curtailed, as management, military air traffic controllers, and scabs who crossed the picket line were moved in. It took several years and billions of dollars to return the system to its pre-strike levels. The economic costs far outweighed the meager pay increases that Patco demanded, the strike prompted mainly by requests for shorter shifts and more time off. Studies showed that overwork of air traffic controllers dramatically affected safety of commercial air travelers.
The strikers were working class men and women who had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers. Many were veterans of the U.S. armed forces where they had learned their skills, and their union had backed Reagan in his election campaign. Nevertheless, Reagan refused to back down. Several strikers were jailed; the union was fined and eventually made bankrupt. Many of the strikers were forced into poverty as a result of being blacklisted for employment.
The mass firing also polarized our politics in ways that prevent us from addressing the root of our economic troubles: the continuing stagnation of incomes despite rising corporate profits and worker productivity. Reagan’s unprecedented dismissal of skilled strikers encouraged private employers to do likewise. Phelps Dodge and International Paper were among the companies that imitated Reagan by replacing strikers rather than negotiating with them. Many other employers followed suit.
As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted, "that was 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." Union-busting consultants were hired by many employers to fend off unionization.
Reagan went on to appoint three management representatives to the five-member National Labor Relations Board, including NLRB Chairman Donald Dotson. Under Dotson's chairmanship, claims brought before the NLRB upheld employers in three-fourths of the cases. Even under Republican Richard Nixon, employers won only about one-third of the time. Reagan attempted to lower the minimum wage for younger workers, ease the child labor and anti-sweatshop laws, tax fringe benefits, and cut back job training programs for the unemployed. He tried to replace thousands of federal employees with temporary workers who would not have civil service or union protections. His administration closed one-third of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's field offices, trimmed its staff by more than one-fourth and decreased the number of penalties assessed against employers by almost three-fourths. In its place, Reagan sought "voluntary compliance" from employers on safety matters.
Ironically, decades before, Reagan was the first president of the Screen Actors Guild to lead that union in a strike.
The union movement has traditionally espoused a set of values -- solidarity being the most important, the sense that each should look out for the interests of all. From this followed commitments of mutual assistance, a sense of equality, a disdain for elitism, and a belief that democracy and individual rights did not stop at the plant gate or the office reception room. These values are increasingly foreign to American culture.
The most recent attack against organized labor came from Wisconsin. In a bitterly contested election, Republican candidate Scott Walker won the Governorship. One of his first official acts was an effort to strip public sector workers of collective bargaining rights. This unprecedented action caused one of the largest labor mobilizations in modern American history, when as many as 100,000 Wisconsin residents surrounded and occupied the state capitol in protest. Although the uprising reanimated the American labor movement in the wake of the Great Recession, Walker narrowly survived a recall vote and pushed through his anti-union agenda, thus crushing any hope for a labor revival.
Teachers in Wisconsin protested Walker's activities through “grade-ins” at administrative offices, petitions, and informal bargaining. The teachers were seeking a raise in wages, which sat, on average, below $10,000 a year.
Meanwhile, as Governor Walker sought to make a name for himself in national politics, other citizens in his state went unnoticed. Milwaukee is the largest city in the state and anchors the most segregated metro area in the country. For black men, the jobless rate tops 50 percent, and the incarceration rate for black males is the highest in the nation. With the loss of manufacturing jobs, Milwaukee has become a poster child for the decades-long decimation of private sector unions. The political center of gravity in Madison was far afield from the struggles of non-union workers and black and Latino communities.
Daniel R. Amerman, CFA, points out that the real U.S. unemployment rate is not 9.8% but between 25% and 30%. That is a depression level unemployment rate that convincingly shows that the U.S. economy is in far worse condition than what is presented by the government or the mainstream media. The "headline" rate of unemployment does not take into account that if a person has been out of work for a long time, already has applications on file at every reasonable prospect, and hasn't filled out a new application recently -- then from an official perspective that person is not only no longer unemployed, but a non-person altogether. Alternatively, if someone with a master's degree in engineering, lost their job, and is working 15 hours a week flipping burgers at minimum wage to keep a little money coming in, then from an official perspective that person would be fully employed.
75% of the collapse in the private economy is being covered by increased government spending. The U.S. government is covering up a gaping hole in the private economy by having the Federal Reserve manufacture money out of thin air at a rate of over $100 billion a month. The current government approach is a lose-lose proposition that temporarily covers up failure at the cost of impoverishing tens of millions of Americans over the long term.
And while we're talking about flipping burgers, here is an example of what business, or management, or corporate America, or whatever you want to call it, does when left to their own devices. Bloomberg News reports that McDonalds has partnered with Visa to launch a website to help its workers making an average $8.25 an hour to create a budget. But while the site is clearly meant to illustrate that McDonalds workers should be able to live on their meager wages, it actually underscores exactly how hard it is for a low-paid fast food worker to get by. The site includes a sample “budget journal” for McDonalds’ employees that offers a laughably inaccurate view of what it’s like to budget on a minimum wage job. Not only does the budget leave a spot open for a “second job,” it also gives wholly unreasonable estimates for employees’ costs: $20 a month for health care, $0 for heating, and $600 a month for rent. It does not include any budgeted money for food or clothing.
Bloomberg News found that it would take the average McDonalds employee one million hours of work to earn as much money as the company’s CEO.
At the same time, McDonalds has begun paying their employees with payroll debit cards issued through J.P. Morgan Chase bank. Outrage has been building over the fee-laden payroll cards since the Times Leader reported on June 17 that Natalie Gunshannon of Dallas Township, PA. had filed a lawsuit against McDonalds for making the cards compulsory. The cards are loaded with fees that leave workers essentially paying the bank for access to their wages.
According to the lawsuit, the J.P. Morgan Chase payroll card carries fees for numerous transactions. They include a $1.50 minimum charge for an ATM withdrawal, $5 for an over-the-counter cash withdrawal, $1 to check the balance, 75 cents per online bill payment and $15 to replace a lost or stolen card. Government officials have endorsed payroll cards as a legal form of wage payment.
In regard to the suit, Natalie Gunshannon stated:
"I’m a young, single mom. When I started my job at McDonalds, I didn’t expect that the only way I would be paid would be on a debit card. When I asked if McDonalds could pay me through direct deposit to my local credit union, which doesn’t charge withdrawal fees, I was told that the debit card was the only option. The federal government has helped reduce fees on credit and debit cards that most consumers use, but those protections don’t apply to the kinds of cards companies like McDonald's are using to pay employees. In the end, when the fees from getting my own hard-earned wages through this card are taken out, my pay would go below minimum wage."
Bloomberg News noted that neither McDonalds nor Visa returned requests for comment by the time of publication.
The newest attack on labor is the Affordable Care Act. Many people believe that "Obamacare" is about healthcare reform. Others believe it is about healthcare control. Both are right, but the truly insidious purpose of this mammoth Bill (that was passed into law without one single Congressman or Senator reading it) is to increase unemployment.
NBC News filed this report:
To tell somebody that you’ve got to decrease their hours because of a law passed in Washington is very frustrating to me,” said Loren Goodridge, who owns 21 Subway franchises. “I know the impact I’m having on some of my employees.”
Goodridge said he’s cutting the hours of 50 workers to no more than 29 hours a week so he won’t trigger the provision in the new health care law that requires employers to offer coverage to employees who work 30 hours or more per week. One employee who has worked at one of Goodridge’s stores for more than a decade said it was “horrible” to learn he was among the employees whose hours would be limited, and that it would be a financial hardship. “I’m barely scraping by with overtime,” he said.
Goodridge said offering health insurance to many more workers would require him to pass a significant price increase on to his customers. "The consumer only has so much money in their pocket," he said. "I just don't feel, knowing my customers and knowing my business, now is the time to be raising prices."
The White House dismisses such examples as "anecdotal." Jason Furman, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisors, said, “We are seeing no systematic evidence that the Affordable Care Act is having an adverse impact on job growth or the number of hours employees are working."
In a letter to Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, Joseph Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has 1.2 million members, joined other labor chieftains in warning that the ACA as presently written could “destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week that is the backbone of the middle class.”
UPS, the nation’s fourth-largest employer said that it will no longer offer health coverage beginning Jan. 1, 2014 to employees' spouses who can get it though other means. UPS cited the 2010 health-care law as part of its thinking. The shift is a sign of corporate America’s increasing willingness to make deep changes to benefits once taken as a given by workers. “The feeling is drastic times call for drastic measures,” said Rich Fuerstenberg, a partner at New York-based benefits consultant Mercer Inc.
I know first hand, the hardships caused by loss of health-care insurance benefits. In 2008 I was working full-time for a retail chain and had health insurance through work. I had to go in for emergency spinal cord surgery. Fortunately, my working relationship with my company was such that they held my position. After several months of rehabilitation, I was able to return to my job, but only on a part-time basis. I still had much physical and occupational therapy to go, as well as follow up doctor's visits, prescriptions, tests, and the possibility of further procedures. But due to my part-time status, I was no longer eligible to receive health insurance.
Another widely misunderstood factor of the war on labor is job loss. Most people believe job loss in America is due to outsourcing, the shipping of American jobs to other countries where labor costs are lower. To an extent this is true. We like to pick on China and say that all of these jobs are going to China, but they’re losing jobs as well. The reason for the job losses can be summed up in one word: automation.
Productivity gains spawned by automation are driving a worldwide decline in jobs, even in developing nations. Over the past decade, U.S. jobs have declined by more than 11 percent. But at the same time, Japan’s employment base has dropped by 16 percent, while the number of jobs in countries including Brazil have declined by some 20 percent. In India, growing use of automation is holding down job growth despite the large amount of outsourcing work that is flowing to the country.
According to a study by the Hackett Group, 750,000 more jobs in IT, finance, and other business services will go offshore by 2016, at which point outsourcing to low-cost destinations like India and China will slow significantly for two reasons. One is that, by then, most of what can be offshored will already have been. The other is that many of the functions that are currently being shipped overseas will have become automated in the next four years.
The study has a couple of key implications. The most significant is that the "jobless recovery" may be structural and thus permanent, and that no amount of anti-outsourcing legislation will change that. To quote Bruce Springsteen, "These jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back."
But not only are currently employed Americans being besieged from all sides, but the outlook for Generation Xers and Millennials is grim.
Student loan debt has reached a new milestone, crossing the $1.2 trillion mark. This pushes student loan debts to dizzying new heights, as they now account for the second highest form of consumer debt behind mortgages. Student loan debts measure at 6% of the overall national debt. This is no small figure, and national debt carries many consequences including slowing economic growth (translating into fewer jobs being created) and rising interest rates. Capital will not be as easy to access.
With more and more emphasis being placed on a college education to compete, rising costs of an already expensive degree, and underemployment of college graduates running rampant, student loan debt is a problem that will cripple economic possibilities and success to come. For far too many young Americans, student loans have become a form of financial enslavement that robs the future of hope.
The AFL-CIO (The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) envisions a future in which work and all people who work are valued, respected and rewarded. While the AFL-CIO represents millions of working people who belong to unions and have the benefits of union membership, the labor federation embraces all people who share the common bond of work.
Work is what we do to better ourselves, to build dreams and to support our families. But work is more than that. Work cures, creates, builds, innovates and shapes the future. Work connects us all.
John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO said, "The union movement stands for the fundamental moral values that make America strong: quality education for our children, affordable health care for every person - not just some - an end to poverty, secure pensions and wages that enable families to sustain the middle-class life that has fueled this nation's prosperity and strength."
The United States currently has the highest levels of income inequality in the advanced industrial world, and the majority of U.S. workers have experienced declining real wages for 25 years.
In the marketplace, it's "one dollar, one vote." What that means is that in an election, a millionaire gets to cast a million votes, and a billionaire gets to cast a billion votes, or 3 times the entire U.S. population, through campaign donations and super-PACs. Elaine Bernard, the Executive Director of the Trade Union Program at Harvard University, and member of the Advisory Board for the National Jobs for All Coalition states:
The worksite is a place where workers learn about the relations of power, especially about how few rights they have to participate in decisions that greatly affect their lives. The autocratic hierarchy at work undermines democracy. It is not surprising that after spending eight hours a day obeying orders, people do not then engage in robust, critical dialogue about the structure of our society.
"Free" labor entails no rights other than the freedom to quit without penalty. That's one step up from indentured servitude, but a long way from democracy.
Workers have no right to employment security and no protection against unjust dismissal in the private sector, unlike workers in most other advanced industrial countries. The U.S. workplace is governed by the doctrine of "employment at will." As long as the dismissal is for "no reason," it's legal. Most Americans believe that there is a law that protects them from being fired for "no cause." But they're wrong.
Further tilting the balance of power against workers, the Supreme Court held that corporations are "persons" and therefore protected by the Bill of Rights. This means that employers are entitled to hold compulsory sessions to lecture employees on the employers' views of unions without granting employees or their unions the right of response. The First Amendment protects transnational corporations designated as persons, but not the rights of real persons as workers.
Lastly, I would be remiss if in talking about Labor Day, I neglected to say a few words regarding our current state of affairs. As you know from my 4th of July, Memorial Day, and other installments, I consider myself to be a very patriotic person and very committed to the ideals upon which this nation was founded. But I am also committed to the human race of which we are all part. When I see working families living below the poverty line, and middle class families struggling from one inadequate paycheck to the next, when I see our government turn a blind eye to corporate corruption, and Wall Street profiteers deliberately manipulating the markets, when I see the dampening effects of world politics on the global economy, I am angered. When I hear talk of jobless recoveries and double dip recessions, when highly skilled people trained in the most advanced technologies compete for entry level jobs, making it impossible for young and unskilled workers to make a living, when seniors who have diligently saved all their lives for retirement are forced back into a brutal job market just to put food on the table when their pensions and retirement funds evaporate, I am outraged.
The interconnecting structure of civilization is inconceivably complex, but there is a fundamental difference between the "me first" mentality of the 1990's and the "me only" mentality of the new millennium. I firmly believe that there should be a job that pays a living wage for everyone who wants one, and I uphold the premise that there should be a job for everyone using their God given talents. Governments and politicians won't effect change, people must effect change. For better or worse, we are all here at this time on this planet, and if things are to improve, there must be a conscious effort to do so by all of us. I don't have the answers, but maybe it is appropriate to say on Labor Day, that just working towards the goal of a better standard of living for every man, woman and child is the beginning of a solution.
I'd like to close with a few quotes:
"It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label." - Barack Obama
"The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds."
- Abraham Lincoln
"Our movement is of the working people, by the working people, for the working people." - Samuel Gompers
"People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"To foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights."
- The mission statement of the U.S. Department of Labor
"Live long and prosper." - Mr. Spock
So for everyone who has to punch the clock, but would rather punch the boss, I extend my wishes for a safe, healthy, and happy Labor Day. And remember, everyone's job is hard, that's why they pay you.
