'Labor' Day?

As I sit at home today and enjoy a federally-mandated break from the daily grind, I wonder if my conservative friends and coworkers understand just how endangered organized labor is in this country.

In Sunday's and today's editions of the DDN, the paper ran several stories highlighting how 'Joe Sixpack' is not sharing in the rewards of our currently 'healthy' economy like his neighbor 'Calvin Caviar' seems to be. Jim DeBrosse provides non-partisan objective data to bolster his claim that wages are not reflecting the growth witnessed in the 1990s (take-home pay experienced similar stagnation for the 20 years previous), despite increases in worker productivity and a 50 percent rise in corporate profits over the past three years. Today's op/ed pages debate this same issue, with the staff providing an opposing view (an editorial from the Investor's Business Daily) citing evidence that workers are in fact receiving far more in total compensation than they have in earlier years. Above the section was a cartoon done by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's R.J. Matson (titled "Left Behind a Rising Tide") which (IHMO) displayed the sentiments of the 'non-levitated' so succinctly.

As their publication implies, Investor's Business Daily looks at this issue from the perspective of the 'elevated'. That publication cites an overall increase of 13.1 percent in tax-free benefits to employees since 2000 and an 8.7 percent gain in total compensation since 2003. While these statistics might be correct, they could be rendered null and void in the psyches of the average employee who sees more and more of his discretionary income going towards fueling his/her vehicles, co-payments and premiums for health care (if they can afford these policies in the first place), and rising tuition costs to educate his/her children to hopefully replace them some day in the American workforce (and help fund their post-retirement incomes--if Social Security still exists in the future).

If I can evoke the rallying cry of John Gibson's and Bill O'Reilly's recent 'War on Christmas' campaigns, I would like to ask you the following question: what did you do today to keep 'labor' in Labor Day? Was it just a day off from work spent at the mall? Did you attend a public event (such as Kettering's Holiday at Home Festival-an end-of-summer gathering) that has no connection to the local or national labor movements other than volunteers manning fund-raising food booths? Or did you participate in a labor-centric celebration (I know...they are few and far between these days)? Did you know that Labor Day was first celebrated in New York City in 1882 (coincidently the birth year of FDR who later nationally instituted the guidelines of a 40-hour workweek and a minimum wage)? Do you know who Samuel Gompers was and what his role in the formation of today's labor movement? Were you aware that the rest of the world celebrates labor on May Day (May 1st of each year) to commemorate a riot that occurred in Chicago in 1886?

It appears that the White House also doesn't 'get' the significance of the holiday. If you read this year's Labor Day presidential message, you will see that any reference to organized labor is conspicuously absent in order to placate the egos of the new 'captains' of industry and their shareholder sycophants. Little do they realize that their successes are built on the backs of the hourly laborers who long ago began a fight for the benefits most of take for granted--and for a growing number of our fellow citizens, will eventually lose.

Labor Day is a day of remembrance and reflection for me. My siblings and I grew up in a home that directly benefited from the labor movement. My dad was a linotype ('hot type') typesetter for two major daily papers (to include the now-defunct Philadelphia Bulletin) before we moved back to northeastern Pennsylvania in 1966. I was the oldest of five children that were being raised in a traditional middle-class way in the late 1960s and early 1970s. My two brothers and I were privileged enough to attend Catholic school run by our local church. Although neither of them was new, we were a 'two-car' household. We had a family get-away every year (a full-blown vacation or just a long day at one of the local amusement parks). My father's single paycheck was enough to put food on the table, clothes on our backs, and still have enough left over to enjoy the niceties of life.

A 'stock' photo of a linotype machine and typesetter, circa 1960s

We hit a rough financial patch after we were flooded out of our house during Hurricane Agnes in 1972 and my dad entered a debt cycle that he couldn't recover from. In October 1978, his union (International Typographical Union) and three others from their local newspaper guild went on strike against their new union-busting Wall Street-centric mangers (Capital Cities Communications) and formed their own newspaper, the Citizen's Voice (now the oldest US paper formed by striking workers--coincidently in the smallest market that still publishes two daily papers in this country) to compete against the Times-Leader. The switch from a corporate operation to a worker-run enterprise took a financial toll upon everyone in the guild, to include the family members. Already experiencing a shaky marriage, the stress of these life-altering events (my dad was his local's president) led to a physical separation of my parents that lasted until he passed away just 13 short years later.

So, as this day draws to the close, I return to my original inquiry--what do my conservative associates do or think about on Labor Day if it's not labor? My guess is scheming to name something else after or create a new national holiday for their labor 'icon' Ronald Reagan.

As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan was recognized as being notoriously pro-management and he greatly weakened that union bargaining power before being pressured to resign before the expiration of his term. In 1981, he began an 8-year quest to single-handedly rescind any federal concessions given to organized labor since the passage of the 'New Deal'. The recent plane crash in Lexington can be directly attributed to his disbanding of PATCO back in 1981 and the weakening of the controllers' position in establishing wage scales and working conditions in FAA facilities (Lexington tower only had one of its two authorized controllers on duty when the Comair flight crashed eight days ago).

Some on AM progressive talk radio believe that these functions will be eventually outsourced to distant locations (perhaps India?) in future budget-cutting moves to minimize costs and maximize the dividends of the airlines' shareholders--all to the potential detriment to passenger safety. Now THAT would be a legacy to be proud of; however, I doubt such facts will dampen their zeal in beatifying 'the Gipper' to sainthood within the 'church' of American conservatism.

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Sorry to be so cynical (or borderline disrespectful)...when I see how the greed of others potentially led to events that directly impacted me or the lives of my siblings or children, I tend to lose my objective perspective.