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 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. Twenty 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.
In 2022, the
shakeout from the COVID-19 pandemic is still shaking out. We’ve had the Great
Resignation, in which millions of workers told their employers to take their
jobs and shove them. And we’re currently in the Quiet Quitting, in which more
millions of workers are declining to go above and beyond their job descriptions
and perform tasks for which they are not being paid—in union terms, they are
working to rule. Employers cannot believe their eyes, so we don’t know how that’s
going to turn out. But I’m hoping that Millennials and Gen Z are feeling the
stirrings of the labor movement of their great-great-grandparents and standing
up for the value they bring to the economy.
I am grateful
today for the battles that labor unions fought. They didn’t always win, but
they did move us forward.
