Today being Labor Day, I’m expressing my gratitude for the benefits that organized labor has brought to the workplace. Yes, I’m talking labor unions. Without them, there’d be a whole lot more miserable employment conditions than exist even now.
There are basically only two
reasons why you and I are not working in sweatshops with dangerous electrical
wiring, hot and cold running vermin and no toilets—unions
and litigation. (I would also have added “80-hour weeks” as one of the
not-any-mores, but that’s pretty much so last century.)
Business management in
companies both large and small do not provide more or less
sanitary and safe conditions, ventilation and some standard
of minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it
because over the past 150 years unions have fought with
blood and treasure for the concept that labor is part of the
value-add of both products and services; and because they’re
terrified that if they screw up and get sued, juries
will strip their corporate assets in punitive damages like a plague of
locusts ranging across Iowa.
I’m not saying that unions
haven’t at times been part of the problem—many of them are every bit as
bloated and arrogant and greedy as corporate
boards, and in fact you’d have trouble distinguishing one stance
from the other across the negotiating table. And I’m also not saying that
America’s propensity toward litigiousness doesn’t suck up resources, like some
cosmic Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that couldn’t have been better spent on something
like, oh, curing cancer.
But it takes the kind of
jackhammer represented by Big Labor and Big Lawsuits to get
the attention of the heirs of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. If you
doubt this, I refer you to the history of the textile industry in America: the
corporations first moved their factories from states with unions to the South
(God bless right-to-work), and then—when even minimum
wage became too much for them—to Mexico, India, China and other
countries where there’s no concern about pesky things like sweatshop
conditions, unsafe factory buildings or child labor.
And it’s not limited to
schmattas, either. Thirty-six years ago during my sojourn in the great, cough,
state of North Carolina (which is probably still electing Jesse Helms to the US
Senate, corpse though he be), there was a fire
in a chicken processing plant that killed 25
workers and injured 54 others. Exit doors from the factory floor had
been locked, trapping the men and women in the inferno (because NO
BREAKS!). Exactly like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911.
I’m not going to talk about
the wages paid or the conditions in the factory, but the plant had never
suffered a single safety inspection, so the managers weren’t troubled by having
to fork out for any, you know, protections. North Carolina is a right-to-work
state, and it don’t hold with no unions.
Let me also bring to your
attention the decades of work by the United Farm Workers to bring
decent wages, as well as working and living conditions, to the men, women and
children who tend and harvest the food we eat. I know that I personally find it
easier to swallow fruits and vegetables when I know they aren't the product of
slavery-in-all-but-name. (It would help if there were some sort of—oh, I dunno—independent
inspection of food products to detect and cull out things like salmonella, e.
coli, cyclospora and screwworm so that we don’t sicken and die from them, but I
may just be indulging in a pipe dream.)
Labor Day was made a national
holiday in 1894, in the wake of the Pullman strike, which ended after President
Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to suppress the strikers. As a sop to
thousands of workers who’d lost their jobs and their homes, Cleveland created a
national holiday to “recognize” labor.
I find that a monumental act
of condescension—declaring a holiday "for the workers", kind of like
Flag Day, without any meaning behind it. It wasn’t even a paid holiday. And it
was set for September to distinguish it from the international socialist/communist
labor day of 1 May. But it played well with Cleveland’s corporate constituents.
(Someone may tell the
Kleptocrat about Cleveland and we’ll see SECDEF assigning the military not only
to firing on strikers, but also to taking up jobs in factories and the farms
after all the deportations. As it is, he's nixed labor unions for several federal
agencies and would happily ensure that working stiffs be reduced to indentured
servitude. Or—what’s wrong with slavery?)
So it’s incumbent upon us, in
times where enormous inroads have been made in the gains unions won for us (I
laugh at the notion of a 40-hour week, because no tech employer for the past 15
years has expected anything less than 60 hours per week from its salaried
staff), to consider where we’d be if they hadn’t existed.
It’s nowhere I’d care to be, I
assure you. So I am grateful today for the battles that labor unions fought.
They didn’t always win, but they did move us forward.
©2026 Bas Bleu
