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Page added on September 3, 2012
A Labor Day without jobs
Americans used to take pride in their work on Labor Day.
Even if you recognize that Labor Day wasn’t always just a day off from work to spend on cookouts and watching sports on TV, you may think of it as another bland holiday dedicated to celebrating something people don’t care much about. Namely, work.
A little history reminds us that labor leaders pushed through the holiday to further their cause and pressured President Grover Cleveland to sign it into law as part of an election-year compromise in 1894, only six days after federal troops broke a bloody strike in the Pullman railroad sleeping car company town outside of Chicago.
In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it
The day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.
A century later, even as unions get weaker and weaker, each year the labor movement tries to remind the public of the spirit of the day, to recognize the many benefits that organized labor has brought to all Americans — from the eight-hour day and 40-hour week to overtime pay, workplace safety regulations, and even paid weekends and holidays off to spend barbecuing.
Now, about 12% of American workers belong to unions, down from a high in the 1950′s of nearly 50%, a decline due largely to big employers offshoring US manufacturing jobs to China and other cheap-labor markets along with a new wave of union busting by plutocrats and their lackey politicians back at home.
Nonetheless, even today, about 60% of Americans approve of labor unions.
As the Occupy Wall Street movement has shown — please, dear Lord, bring Occupy back soon — the 99% is not as stupid as our corporate overlords seem to think. Even though most of us are deprived of the chance to join a labor union, ordinary Americans still recognize that we need to band together to protect our interests.
But how?
From the workplace to the streets
Given that many lost manufacturing jobs will never return to US shores, traditional labor unions focused on factories and other workplaces may need to evolve into something else. With its natural habitat being the public space of both city streets and the Internet, Occupy may be the best model for the 99% to unite.
Meantime, if the global economy is permanently exiting the era of economic growth, it could mean the end of jobs as we know them.
But the end of nine-to-five work for a corporate employer certainly won’t mean the end of work. Quite the opposite — an economy beyond growth and after peak oil will need humans to step back in as fossil fuels deplete and machines shut down.
As you flip burgers this Labor Day — whether in your backyard or, if you’re not so lucky, at work — it’s right to pay tribute to the great labor leaders and brave workers alike who stood up for themselves and for America’s middle class against physical violence and all sorts of intimidation.
And it’s prudent to think ahead to a different kind of future where we’ll have to stand up for ourselves in new ways against an entrenched plutocracy that doesn’t need our labor anymore but that still counts on our compliance.
– Erik Curren, Transition Voice
5 Comments on "A Labor Day without jobs"
wmscott on Mon, 3rd Sep 2012 1:46 pm
I am living it, lost my job a few months ago and have run into age discrimation, low wages and lack of jobs in my field. I have been blogging about at http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-heat-your-home-for-less
titled “I live in your future”, since what has happen to me, will probably happen to you some day, reading my story may be like reading your future in advance.
Sincerely Yours; Wm Scott Anderson
DMyers on Mon, 3rd Sep 2012 7:35 pm
These symbolic tributes, i.e., holidays doing honor to this or that, are mostly artifacts of meaningless political opportunism. It is glaringly clear this year that Labor Day is a residual or vestige from a different time, the only remaining function of which is to create a much welcomed three day weekend for government workers, bankers and professionals.
As for the history of the so-called Labor Movement in America, its most striking characteristic was its operation in a substrate of violence. The workers were certain losers in a free market, i.e. one without strong-arm enforcement of their arbitrary demands. If one doesn’t want the job, there are always five others who do. The only way to prevent that trade out is to break the legs of those five replacements as they walk in the door. The rapid, multi-faceted expansion of post WWII America brought an abundance of jobs but a greater abundance of persons to fill them (spots of labor scarcity have been intense but short lived). Automation then came to chew away constantly on the level of market based wages. That was the situation before off-shoring, the final nail in the Labor Movement coffin.
This is the way I remember the demise of the Labor Movement. Rampant inflation in the seventies and early eighties was its be all and end all. Management and government came to realize that cost of living adjustments (COLA) in union contracts were creating an inflation driving feedback loop. As costs of products rose, the non-unionized elements of the economy did not receive COLAs. Union built products became increasingly unaffordable to the wider consumer market. Labor costs took a larger and larger chunk of company profits. Foreign manufacturers with much lower labor costs were entering the American market with products priced to reflect that labor cost difference. It was resolved, and rationally so, that labor costs had to be reduced. From that point on, there was a steady movement in that direction, and it continues to this day. The breaking of Organized Labor probably did as much to stop the cancer of inflation as Paul Volcker’s interest rate chemotherapy, which received all the credit.
The economy of the Labor era was an easy one to understand. Growing population, people needed stuff, someone built needed stuff, consumers bought the stuff, and everyone made some money off numerous markups in the process. But the fact is, no one understands this new economy that has moved into the slums left by its predecessor in which Labor was an essential element. Economics has been redefined without a redefinition. A glut of labor seeks its purpose in a world that is cutting back.
DC on Mon, 3rd Sep 2012 8:00 pm
Factory mass-production only produced a relatively short burst of broad-based employment. In as early as the 1930s, it was abundantly clear to anyone studying the issue, that factories could produce far more ‘goods’ than than the economy needed. The great depression was a much a crisis of over-production and saturated markets as much as anything else. A situation we find ourselves in yet again, but this time, with no real end in sight. The financialization of the economy weve seen the last few decades as been an un-planned response to this. Of course we all know how thats turned out……
Mass unions for a mass-market,mass-production system, to feed the shop-drive-consume economy are pretty much over. If unions want to be relevant again, it will have to be in the context of a much broader re-design of the entire economy and how we make, distribute and sell goods. Something unions cant do, and the corporations wont do.
Kenz300 on Mon, 3rd Sep 2012 8:49 pm
Every country needs to develop a plan to balance its population with its resources, food, water, energy and jobs.
The population explosion, adding a billion more people in the last 12 years, has seen the pace of population growth exceed the number of jobs and resources to support them.
BillT on Tue, 4th Sep 2012 1:28 pm
The Age of ‘for profit’ Capitalism is over. It died out with the Age of Petroleum. We will have to reset to an economy built on some other base for the future. One based on needs and not growth.