George’s Labor Day special

It’s the last day of summer, last hurrah at the swimming pool, last day to wear white, and of course a great time for a cookout.

About.com says of this three-day weekend: "The last big summer holiday"

Labor Day has become the second biggest cookout event of the year in the United States. . . . If you live in the northern climates this may be your last chance to throw one last backyard cookout . . .

Given these present-day connotations of Labor Day, it’s easy to forget its origins and meaning. But at least for those of us whose work involves labor relations, human resources, employment law, and the like, it should be a time to remember, to look back at labor history, and to step back from the details and do a little big picture thinking about jobs, labor, and work – and our personal contributions thereto.

So I’ve done a bit of Labor Day Googling to bring you some Labor Day special reads.

This New York Times editorial encourages some pensiveness in this political season, without pushing any viewpoint (for a change): "From Now Until Then"

Today's a good day - in the thick of political battle - to indulge that sense of national self-awareness, to survey what we hold in common. The coming weeks will pass in a rush, and it will take some will on our part to remember that what divides us at present - the political visions we commit ourselves to - will be, in two months, what unites us, as we stream to the polling places, Americans all, claiming the right that each vote embodies. Read more

Next, here's a wonderful history of Labor Day, featuring a Detroit perspective and historic b&w photos, from The Detroit News: "How labor won its day"

The Father of Labor Day, Peter J. McGuire . . . in 1882 introduced the idea for the holiday . . . formally at a meeting of the Central Labor Union on May 18,1882. . .

The following September, New York workers staged a parade up Broadway to Union Square. Few, if any, workers got the day off. Most were warned against marching in the parade with the threat of getting fired. Despite the warning, more than 10,000 workers showed up for the march. . . .

Twelve years later, on June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland, long a foe of organized labor, but under voter pressure, signed a Labor Day holiday bill. Earlier that same year, President Cleveland's most famous labor conflict, the Pullman strike in Chicago, had forced the president to call up federal troops. . . Rioting broke out: strikers were killed and leaders jailed, but even as the strike was broken, the labor movement gained steam.

Strong support for the feisty American labor movement emerged in worker dominated cities like Detroit. . . Few cities are more identified with the advances of American workers than the Motor City.

Following a description of early Detroit labor history, the article discusses the labor union and labor law turning point of the Great Depression, when "[l]aid-off Briggs workers cried, 'Buy American? With what?'" and unemployment in Michigan reached 43 percent in 1932.

[T]he 1937 wave of sitdown strikes began to turn the tide. . . The sitdown tactic allowed strikers to shut down production and remain protected from the weather. The arrangement also allowed the workers to develop a solidarity difficult to foster with a conventional walkout. The sitdown wave grew rapidly after the historic . . . sit-down strike at Fisher Body in Flint in 1937 . . .

Most of the federal laws protecting workers were passed during the 1930s. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which strengthened unions' rights to organize and negotiate with employers, was key legislation. . .

Fast forward a few decades and the balance had tipped too far: labor was getting fat and contented:

But big labor's leaders would later lose much of their clout with the rank and file. Many moved to the suburbs and abandoned the Detroit parade. Attendance dwindled to barely 6,000 in 1966. Workers spent the three-day holiday enjoying backyard barbecues, boats and summer cottages: the fruits of their victories.

Neither shamed by fines nor encouraged by prizes, workers refused to turn out for parades in the 1970s, and the parades were cancelled until 1981 when a meager 3,000 aging veterans of pioneer sit down strikes and picket line battles reassembled to give the traditional show of solidarity one more try.

In the next year, America's economy became unglued: large numbers of Michigan automotive workers were laid off in the recession. Police said the 1982 parade drew 170,000 marchers and onlookers, reflecting support for laid off workers and striking air traffic controllers who had been fired by President Ronald Reagan the previous year. In 1987 the Labor Day parade drew 100,000. But the momentum petered out. . . .

Today, most Detroiters think of the holiday as a last summer fling. Many Americans have forgotten the holiday's roots in unionism. Relaxing at the beach or barbeque, it's easy to forget our grandparents who marched in the streets in huge parades celebrating the working man's efforts with a show of solidarity. Without union intervention, overtime pay, vacations and sick leave policies might not exist, nor workplace safety rules protect us.

Read more [bonus at the end: genuine union song lyrics]

Even people who think unions are unnecessary today tend to accept uncritically the proposition that everything positive that came the way of the American worker back in the old days is attributable to union militance. That is not quite so obvious. Much might have also been achieved legislatively without the strongarm and often violent and coercive tactics on the part of both labor and management that often pitted workers against each other. Much also may have been natural economic evolution.

Nonetheless, after reading about the greed and violent resistance of the upper-class capitalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- before their world was torn up by the Depression -- even a skeptic must wonder if the union apologists don't have it mostly right.

The "Eclectic List of Events in U.S. Labor History" (compiled by Allen Lutins, allen@lutins.org) presents in chronology style the long history of labor struggles in America, featuring many of the most dramatic and violent conflicts.

A few examples from a long and interesting list:

13 January 1874
The original Tompkins Square Riot. As unemployed workers demonstrated in New York's Tompkins Square Park, a detachment of mounted police charged into the crowd, beating men, women and children indiscriminately with billy clubs and leaving hundreds of casualties in their wake.

14 July 1877
A general strike halted the movement of U.S. railroads . . . At the "Battle of the Viaduct" in Chicago, federal troops . . . killed 30 workers and wounded over 100.

Late 1885/Early 1886
[T]he Knights of Labor . . . took to the streets to demand the universal adoption of the eight hour day.

Chicago was the center of the movement. Workers there had been agitating for an eight hour day for months, and on the eve of May 1, 50,000 workers were already on strike. 30,000 more swelled their ranks the next day, bringing most of Chicago manufacturing to a standstill. [O]n Monday, May 3, a fight involving hundreds broke out at McCormick Reaper between locked-out unionists and the non-unionist workers McCormick hired to replace them. The Chicago police . . . quickly moved in with clubs and guns to restore order. They left four unionists dead and many others wounded.

Angered by the deadly force of the police, a group of anarchists, led by August Spies and Albert Parsons, called on workers to arm themselves and participate in a massive protest demonstration in Haymarket Square on Tuesday evening, May 4. . . [N]near the end of the evening, an individual, whose identity is still in dispute, threw a bomb that killed seven policemen and injured 67 others. Hysterical city and state government officials rounded up eight anarchists, tried them for murder, and sentenced them to death.

5 July 1893
During a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which had drastically reduced wages, the 1892 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson Park was set ablaze, and seven buildings were reduced to ashes. The mobs raged on, burning and looting railroad cars and fighting police in the streets, until 10 July, when 14,000 federal and state troops finally succeeded in putting down the strike.

1894
Federal troops killed 34 American Railway Union members in the Chicago area attempting to break a strike, led by Eugene Debs, against the Pullman Company.

25 March 1911
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, occupying the top three floors of a ten-story building in New York City, was consumed by fire. One hundred and forty-seven people, mostly women and young girls working in sweatshop conditions, lost their lives.

2 December 1911
A Chicago "slugger," paid $50 by labor unions for every scab he "discouraged," described his job in an interview: "Oh, there ain't nothin' to it. I gets my fifty, then I goes out and finds the guy they wanna have slugged."

20 April 1914
The "Ludlow Massacre." In an attempt to persuade strikers at Colorado's Ludlow Mine Field to return to work, company "guards," engaged by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and other mine operators and sworn into the State Militia just for the occasion, attacked a union tent camp with machine guns, then set it afire. Five men, two women and 12 children died . . .

1934
The Electric Auto-Lite Strike. In Toledo, OH, two strikers were killed and over two hundred wounded by National Guardsmen. Some 1300 National Guard troops, including included eight rifle companies and three machine gun companies, were called in to disperse the protestors.

25 June 1938
The Wages and Hours (later Fair Labor Standards) Act is passed, banning child labor and setting the 40-hour work week. The Act went into effect in October 1940, and was upheld in the Supreme Court on 3 February 1941.

1 April 1946
A strike by 400,000 mine workers in the U.S. began. U.S. troops seized railroads and coal mines the following month.

4 October 1946
The U.S. Navy seized oil refineries in order to break a 20-state post-war strike.

27 August 1950
President Truman ordered the U.S. Army to seize all the nation's railroads to prevent a general strike. The railroads were not returned to their owners until two years later.

8 April 1952
President Truman ordered the U.S. Army to seize the nation's steel mills to avert a strike. The act was ruled to be illegal by the Supreme Court on 2 June.

18 March 1970
The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the Post Office Department began with a walkout of letter carriers in Brooklyn and Manhattan, soon involving 210,000 of the nation's 750,000 postal employees. With mail service virtually paralzyed in New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia, President Nixon declared a state of national emergency and assigned military units to New York City post offices. The stand-off culminated two weeks later.

These are just a few examples of the massive strikes and demonstrations and numerous acts of violence marring the history of US labor-management relations. Read more

It is interesting that so much time – generations -- passed during which labor and management battled so bitterly before the ultimate proud successes of the union movement were achieved.

This may simply be an indication of how entrenched and stubborn management was, with government for so long squarely on its side. On the other hand, it may also be a reflection of the fact that improvements in pay and working conditions were less a function of labor stridency than of independently occurring political and economic changes.

To give one example, the eight hour day was apparently a labor goal since at least 1885, yet the Fair Labor Standards Act enacting the forty hour workweek (subject to overtime pay, of course) was not passed until 1938. At that time, it was part of the New Deal effort to get people back to work. A surplus of idle workers meant it made sense for government to encourage a shorter workweek, so the existing work would be spread around to more workers. Previously, perhaps no such concern existed, and agitation for shorter work hours may have been viewed as just the whining of lazy workers.

In closing, take a look at what the Department of Labor says for its Labor Day message:

The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation's strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker. Read more