Labor & capital

On Labor Day it’s appropriate to turn our thoughts to the current employment environment; maybe consider what it says about our society as a whole.

That’s because (although these days it demarks the official End of Summer and draws the line beyond which community swimming pools on the East Coast are closed and white shoes across the country must be put in the back of the closet), Labor Day is supposed to be about, you know, labor. As in the laborers who transmute land into crops transported to city markets in vehicles built by other workers over highways laid and maintained by construction crews, and bought by the folks who clean the houses, serve the meals, tailor the clothes, landscape the gardens, install the alarm systems, reroof the mansions and fight the fires for the Boardroom Set.

Labor Day was first observed 5 September 1882 in New York and became an official national holiday 12 years later in the wake of the nationwide Pullman Strike, during which federal authorities acting in behalf of the Pullman Palace Car Company shot strikers, killing 13 and wounding another 57. They chose the New York unions’ date in September over the international workers’ day of 1 May to distance us from that whole foreign socialism thing.

Note that the day is founded in labor’s blood spilled by management violence. Nothing to do with fashion choices; it was as serious as the issues underlying the Declaration of Independence: All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. You can cavil that by “all men” the Founding Fathers weren’t thinking beyond white males of the planter-merchant classes; i.e., Capital; but the framework they forged was stronger and larger than the vocabulary and is scalable (as we say in software and networking these days) to a great degree.

Plus—we hold these truths to be self-evident.

Well, it’s been a rocky old ride for the labor movement, which to a considerable extent fueled America’s post-war (WWII—it was in all the media) prosperity far beyond the factory floor: raising the workplace pay, environmental and safety standards for laborers in the fields and offices, too; driving both the production and consumption of everything from houses to microchips; and providing the economic security that enables exploration and innovation. They didn’t do this on their own; but in demanding their share of the recognition and recompense for this economic pie, they expanded it.

It was that whole notion that the laborer is worthy of his hire.

I’m not saying that the unions that represented a lot of these workers didn’t become as arrogant and myopic as the management they fought for more than a century, because they did. In the past couple of decades they misread industrial and consumption trends every bit as much as the corporate clowns. I think the technical term used by economists is “screw the pooch”, which they did royally.

And they managed to become the go-to boys for all blame—no matter what the area (real estate collapse, bank failures, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, El Niño, erectile dysfunction), there’s some politician who’s going to point the finger at unions. And as corporations extort tax cuts from governments at all levels while simultaneously off-shoring jobs, paying ever larger executive bonuses, filling the campaign funds of politicians at all levels and giving their shareholders the appearance of financial success—as this is going on, the working stiff (in coveralls, white collar or tee-shirt and jeans) takes home smaller paychecks and worries about when the next round of layoffs will be announced.

If s/he has a job, that is. Fourteen million of us don’t.

So, on Labor Day 2011, what’s the latest?

In Wausau, Wisc., the organizers of the town’s Labor Day parade—a coalition of 30 local unions—announced that they were banning Republican pols from marching. That’s on account of the hard-line anti-union stance the ’Pubs have been taking, most recently in the Wisconsin state legislature when they took away the right to collective bargaining from public service employees. (Meaning essentially that if you’re a teacher, a DMV tester, a firefighter or a snowplow operator you have no ability to band together to negotiate the terms of your employment contract or conditions.)

Now, slashing the femoral artery of state public sector unions and then expecting to prance down Main Street in an event celebrating the contributions of workers to the country is a prime example of both the arrogance and disconnect of our elected representatives. It’s also an example of how one may smile and smile and be a villain.

But of course when the banning announcement hit the media, the pols involved couldn’t move for fear of tripping over their quivering lower lips at the utter, inconceivable injustice of being disinvited to an occasion where they could (for hardly any expense out of their corporately-funded campaign coffers) meet and greet the people they have to pretend to represent. You’d have thought they’d been told they could never again borrow a company’s G4 to fly to Venice on a fact-finding mission to study the glassmaking and pasta industries.

So, earlier last week the unions reversed their decision and announced they’d let the little babies in. Well, they let them in because the town mayor told the unions that if they didn’t invite all the kids in the class to their party, there would be no cupcakes.

Personally, I’m interested in seeing what kind of reception these egregious egos get from the people of a strongly union town. I want to know if they actually have the cojones to show up after all their whining.

By way of contrast, it’s interesting to note this Labor Day that 25 of the top-100 highest paid CEOs in the country raked in more than their corporations paid in taxes last year. It’s actually another mark of corporate arrogance and disconnect from the concept of the civitas—you know, the shared responsibility inherent in the social contract of communities. Clearly the only community these people understand is a gated one.

Given the political climate that surrounds us from Congress on down (although frankly I don’t know how you can really go down from Congress), I wouldn’t be surprised to find that next year Andy Borowitz’s “report” that Labor Day has been outsourced to China turns out to be true.

As for me, while I’m thinking about the men and women of the labor movement who did so much for us, and I’m glad to have the time off, I’m painfully cognizant of the fact that as a contractor I’m not getting paid for this day.