A Labor Day Call to Arms
By Jim Hightower, AlterNet
August 29, 2003
Fire up the old grill, do a few twelve-ounce elbow
bends to stay limber and just kick back. That's what
Labor Day's all about, isn't it?
No, Labor Day has gone all soft on us, and it's time
to harden up on its true meaning. This holiday is not
some vague tribute to men and women who labor. Rather,
it's a radically democratic declaration of the intent
to build and sustain a middle class in America – as
bold a statement (and as fraught with peril) as
Jefferson's Declaration. Far from being about taking a
day off, Labor Day is about people taking democratic
power.
>From the start, Labor Day was a bottom-up holiday,
our only national celebration to be put on the
calendar by the working class. It started when feisty
Matt McGuire of the Carpenters Union and dauntless
William McCabe of the Typographers called for a
massive march in New York City to show the strength of
laboring people.
Defying bosses and risking their jobs and personal
safety, thousands of workers of every trade left work
on September 5, 1882, and marched with banners, bands
and bravado right up Fifth Avenue, right past the
mansions of the Astors, Vanderbilts, and other Robber
Barons.
It was not a parade, but a call to arms, the beginning
of labor's fight for an eight-hour day at fair pay.
The demonstration was so successful that it spread to
other cities, and the idea of setting aside a specific
day to affirm that laboring people have rights and are
creators of wealth took hold. It was a demand for
respect, finally achieved in 1894 when President
Grover Cleveland signed the law creating Labor Day.
What a nice gesture... except that Ol' Grover had
unleashed 12,000 federal troops just days earlier to
crush a strike by Pullman rail car workers, killing
dozens of union members.
But that's been the story every step of the way in our
under-appreciated struggle to establish what's become
taken for granted as "The American Way of Life". The
40-hour work week, the wage floor, collective
bargaining, retirement security, Medicare, job-safety
protections, and so much more that sustains the
middle-class possibility for a majority of our people
were not provided by the founders in 1776 – and they
certainly were not given to us by generous corporate
chieftains. Rather, the middle-class framework was
built by us – We The People.
But now, piece-by-piece, the bosses and politicians
are rapidly dismantling this framework. From global
trade scams to almost daily administrative rulings by
the Bush White House, not only are unions and workers
generally under assault, but the very opportunity to
achieve a middle-class life is being shut off for
millions of Americans.
We've seen pieces of this theft:
the looting of our public treasury through givebacks
to the rich;
the White House assault on regulatory protections for
everything from workplace safety to the 40-hour
workweek;
the high-tech industry's despicable manipulation of
immigration loopholes to displace middle-class
American employees;
the privatization push through every agency of
government;
the secretly negotiated trade deals that empower
global corporations to overturn labor protections
throughout the world;
the maneuvering to gut the pension laws so
corporations can evade their legal and moral
obligations to retirees... and so many more.
The latest dismantling is a ruling on overtime pay by
Bush's Anti-Labor Department. It lets corporations
arbitrarily designate millions of wage workers as
"managerial" employees, exempt from overtime pay. Such
workers as nurses, firefighters and computer
programmers will be forced to work more hours for no
pay – taking money out of their pockets, stealing
their weekends... and stealing their right to a life
beyond the job.
The whole adds up to far worse than the parts, for
it's our egalitarian ethic of the common good that
they are abandoning, our hope for middle-class
possibilities that they're destroying. It's said that
the rich and the poor will always be with us. Perhaps,
but it is not assured anywhere or in any time that the
middle class will be there.
This Labor Day is no different than the first one that
workers themselves declared in 1882 – it's about
taking back power from the thieves who are trying to
steal our middle-class future. It's time for America's
working class to consider Labor Day again not as a
holiday, but as a call to arms.
Jim Hightower is author of "Thieves In High Places:
They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It
Back" (Viking, 2003).
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