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-five
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 César
Chávez and
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.
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.)
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.
©2024 Bas Bleu
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