Labor Day weekend is now upon us. Establishment of the holiday was an olive branch the US extended in 1894 to honor American workers after the government’s brutal crackdown on the Pullman strikers. The strike, which shut down much of the nation’s railroads, was sparked when railroad mogul George Pullman reduced his workers’ wages but not the rents they had to pay to live in his company-owned housing. Pro-business President Grover Cleveland and his Attorney General, a former lawyer for the railway, unleashed 12,000 troops on the strikers resulting in the death, maiming, and arrests of people more interested in making ends meet than meeting their ends.
Like many of our holidays—Easter, the occasion for a secular government to hunt colored eggs on the White House lawn; St. Patrick’s Day, the occasion for the non-Irish to get drunk in public; the Fourth of July, the occasion for taxpayers who begrudge poor children a free breakfast to lustily applaud military fly-overs at ball parks—Labor Day has lost its moorings. Rather than honor the American worker, it is now more in honor of American ingenuity in creating barbecue sauces. Labor gets our attention these days only when the unemployment figures go up. No one much cares about the working conditions of those with jobs, because--as they are told in so many ways ad nauseam--they are lucky to have jobs.
The ongoing effort to marginalize and demonize workers’ unions is in full flower with elected governments in Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, and Florida now doing the union busting bidding of corporate America. Most sadly, much of it is being done with the consent of the governed, who have come to think of unions primarily as the means by which 20-million dollar-a-year ballplayers get to have their urine samples kept secret from their employers. Even Hollywood, once the home of strong unionism and the source of films advancing workers’ rights from The Little Tramp to Norma Rae, has taken a decidedly Koch Brothers turn in its view of the working man. He is either like the DeNiro character in Silver Linings Playbook, unemployed and recklessly wasting his time and money trying to shortcut his way into a livelihood. Or she is like the Maggie Gyllenhaal character in Won’t Back Down, an ideal worker blocked from achieving her highest aspirations by her reactionary union. Fox News, if it were so inclined, might find evidence of a “War on Labor Day” in all this and announce a campaign to put Labor back into Labor Day.
How’d it happen? Well, Norma Rae was 1979, and then came 1980 and Ronald Reagan, the union turncoat, kicking his new Gilded Age off with a frontal attack on the air traffic controllers. Presto, just like that, “the greed is good” decade was born…now heading into its fourth decade. Except for a brief, weak show of a pulse in Wisconsin last year, the union movement in the US has been moribund ever since.
Employee X., who wrote that must-read, new book, Look Before You Lean, once asked a small group of corporate managers to list all the ways they could think of that employees register their unhappiness with their jobs. Their feedback consisted of: “They whine.” “They go to HR.” “They cop an attitude.” “They quit.” “They go postal.”
That was it. “They form a union” didn’t even get honorable mention. That’s how irrelevant the American labor movement has become…even middle managers aren’t afraid of it.
It was left to Employee X. to mention union organizing to that particular audience of managers, but their eyes glazed over as if he had just brought up the Peloponnesian War. He did, however, manage to get their attention when he presented his own list of what actions unhappy workers might also take:
Sabotage
Gossiping about the company outside
Voicing complaints at company meetings
Sending letters to the Board of Directors
Passive resistance (hoping bad company policies will just go away)
Passive/aggressive behavior—smile to the boss's face/roll eyes behind the boss's back
Leaking harmful information to government agencies, media, or competitors
Theft
Gold bricking
Calling in sick
Slowing down the assembly line
Whistleblowing
Taking the company suggestion box seriously
I’m afraid that what passes for worker movement in this country for the time being will be just that kind of sporadic, go-it alone activity (and gods almighty, how we hate to commit and love our independence). But I believe this state of affairs is only for the time being. Increasing waves of immigrant workers into the domestic work force with far less to lose than their American counterparts, combined with increasing awareness of workers’ rights in Third World countries where Marx and Woody Guthrie will eventually show up on the village computer will plunge the global economy into a management-labor struggle that will make the 1930s look like a Koch Brother’s wet dream. I believe this is what is called an historical inevitability.