For the Laborers

Labor Day is one of my favorite holidays, neck and neck with the 4th of July and Martin Luther King’s birthday. On Labor Day we remember the men and women whose toil and sweat built this country, and we celebrate the very idea of work.

Names from the past roll across my mind like movie credits: Walter Reuther, George Meany, Joe Hill, John L. Lewis, Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Studs Terkel, A. Phillip Randolph -- people who dedicated their lives to improving the condition of workers, to building a strong middle class, and to insuring that labor was valued and had a place in the national conversation, a seat at the table.

Today the “Labor Movement” is like a terminal patient on life support. Union membership in the private sector is almost non-existent; meanwhile, as state and local governments continue to reel and stagger from the sluggish economy, union members in the public realm are forced to take pay cuts, furlough days, and watch as a backlash develops against pension plans that are always described in the media as “generous,” “lucrative,” or “Cadillac.”

Rough times for wage earners today, not much hope for improvement tomorrow. The mainstream media obsesses about stock prices and quarterly earnings forecasts, as if these are the only economic barometers that matter; CEO’s that boost earnings by dumping workers into the deep end of the pool of the unemployed are rewarded with bonuses.

There is a stark disconnect between the economy described by CNBC and the reality on the street that can no longer be glossed over or ignored. The nexus between worker productivity and reward is long gone – compared to their counterparts in other industrialized nations, Americans work longer hours per day and more days per year than anyone. We’re a nation of workaholics, driven by need and the fear that we are falling behind. Our productivity rises year after year but our reward – our wages – remain the same or fall.

The American economy is ass-backwards, upside down, off kilter and out of whack. We need John L. Lewis and Cesar Chavez and A. Phillip Randolph. We need their spirit, their sense of moral outrage and their determination for justice, equity and dignity. We need to pay more than lip service to people who wake up every single day and go to jobs and put in an honest day’s work building, maintaining, restoring or repairing; we need to honor those who serve, teach, or care for others; we need to honor those who clean, scrub and polish; we need to resuscitate the tacit agreement between capital and labor, bosses and workers, that once rewarded hard and honest work, reliability and fidelity, with pay scales that are not insulting or disgraceful.

On this Labor Day I think of John Steinbeck and the Grapes of Wrath because it seems to me that it is those grapes we are destined to harvest unless we wake up and face our delusions. Steinbeck wrote, “The great owners…know the great fact: when property (or wealth or political power) accumulates in too few hands it is taken away.”