WHY LABOR DAY MATTERS

The mindful rather than mindless celebration of a national holiday

Today’s Amazon Labor Union Rally

When I was a child my father told us that when he was a little boy his father took him to a rally for Eugene V. Debs. Grandpa Solomon was a worker on the Rock Island Railroad and instilled in his children a strong support for unions. My parents used to tell us that if you ever crossed a picket line then don’t bother to come home.

My brother worked for Caesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers during the 1960’s and 1970’s. So I was raised in a family of strong union supporters, and I remember being kind of shocked when I first came into contact with people who weren’t.

I was in my twenties or thirties when I drove up to a store where there was a picket line outside. I said to my friend in the car with me, “Oh, we can’t go in. There’s a picket line.”

“Oh you can still go in,” she said. “We can just walk around it.”

”What?!” I responded. “That would make us scabs! We can’t do that!”

I remember that she looked genuinely perplexed. She honestly didn’t understand. I realized then that not everyone saw it as sacrosanct to support striking workers. I had been living in a bubble. And as the years went by, the situation in America went a whole lot further than people just not supporting strikes. The “pro-business” trend of the 1980’s was about more than not supporting unions; it was about destroying them. And to a large part, it did. Ronald Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers. Union membership and power shrank dramatically. Drama and scandals within union leadership added fuel to the fire.

The history of organized labor in America is a story of unbelievable struggle, even tragedy. Throughout the country people have been hurt and killed for trying to achieve the most basic elements of a fair and dignified life. From attacks by private goons to attacks by the police themselves, there have been times in our history when labor organizing was a very risky move.

During the 1800’s the dreaded Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired to conduct operations against organized labor. During the labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they infiltrated unions, supplied guards, kept strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruited goon squads to intimidate workers. Hired to reinforce the strikebreaking measures of industrialist Henry Clay Frick (who was acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie, the head of Carnegie Steel), their union busting measures led to numerous deaths among people doing nothing more than seeking to unionize. The history of labor in America has been a tale of humungous struggle filled with frustration and even terror. In 1917, a man named Frank Little was pulled from his bed and lynched because of his union activities.

Still, people persevered as they are persevering today. The establishment of organized labor didn’t just happen; people worked to make it happen. Outlawing child labor didn’t just happen; people worked to make it happen. Setting a ceiling on a normal work week and a floor beneath wages didn’t just happen; people worked to make it happen. A mindful rather than a mindless celebration of Labor Day includes honor and respect for those who sacrificed so much over the years to make organized labor a force in American life.

It is a very important force, without which there is no counterpoint to the unfettered power of capital. Now, as much as a hundred years ago, such a counterforce is needed. Employers should not have the right to withhold safety protection from their employees. Those who run a business should not have the right to make workers work for starvation wages. The modern workplace should not be without dignity and benefits and opportunity. That ideal had become a given in America, yet the hard won acceptance of the ideal began to slip away from the American imagination over the last few decades. Now, thanks to a new generation of union members and today’s union heroes like Flight Attendant Union President Sara Nelson and Amazon Labor Union founder and President Christian Smalls, it’s beginning to return. 71 percent of Americans now say that they support unions, a higher level of support than we have seen since the 1960’s.

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. Today I was in NYC for the Labor Day Rally organized by the Amazon Labor Union. The National Labor Relations Board recently rejected Amazon’s appeal to overturn the organizing success of Amazon Labor in Staten Island, so there is a lot to celebrate. But the work goes on - at Amazon, at Starbucks, at Chipotle, at Trader Joes’s and elsewhere. As we rallied outside the apartment buildings of Howard Schultz and Jeff Bezos today, I couldn’t help wondering, as I often do, why a multibillionaire would spend so much effort busting the union efforts of their employees. If Schultz and Bezos were to acquiesce to every demand made by Starbucks and Amazon workers right now, it wouldn’t change their own financial circumstances at all.

Were they to do so, in fact, they would be heroes. They would be leaders in a fundamental course-correction that American capitalism needs so badly. They would be as celebrated as they are now resented. They would make history not just for their success at business but for their integrity. As it is, their union busting is wrong, it is illegal, and it will not succeed.

Standing there, I fantasized how great it would be if Howard or Jeff came down from their penthouses, spoke to the crowd and said, “You know guys, I’ve thought about it. And I think you’re right.” Perhaps they do, in their deepest hearts, think that.

And perhaps, someday, they will.