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.
Republican candidate for vice president JD
Vance sparked rightful guffaws and boos last week when he assured a gathering
of firefighter union members in Boston that he and the Kleptocrat “are the most
pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” Even if true, that would be a low
bar, but it seems appropriate to use this as the starting point for thoughts
about workers being worthy of their hire.
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 become 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
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. 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.
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
