What Most Americans Don't Remember about Labor Day

What most Americans don’t remember is that we owe our early September three-day holiday to President Grover Cleveland, who, in 1894, helped establish Labor Day as a national holiday. At the time, Cleveland wasn’t so much interested in the leisure of working people as he was in calming the waters between union members and the government roiled to huge waves by the government’s handling of the Pullman Strike. Cleveland had sent in federal Marshals and 12,000 U.S. troops to break a national boycott against the railroads on the grounds that the U.S. mail was being interfered with. Thirteen deaths and numerous casualties resulted. The governor of Illinois, John P. Altgeld, was so outraged by Cleveland’s actions (suppressing the strike, not creating Labor Day), that he managed to get the Democratic convention not to nominate Cleveland for a second term.

What most Americans also don’t remember is that Labor Day was supposed to celebrate unions, not to be a cookout or an all-day beer festival. Cleveland was trying to establish what he thought was a compromise between radical leftists and good old Americans by choosing the first Monday in September rather than following the  European custom of making May 1 the left’s great holiday.

And finally, what most Americans no longer remember, except in a negative sense, is unions themselves. Union membership is now about 6.9 percent of the non-government workforce--the lowest rate in more than a century--and the number of union members employed by state and local governments is for the first time higher than those employed by private industry.

The labor movement in the United States really got going shortly after the Civil War. Initially it was led by Samuel Gompers, a cigar maker, who became president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), a conglomerate consisting mainly of craft unions, i.e. unions representing only members of a given trade. Late in the 1930s industrial unions--unions organized by companies rather than individual trades--became more prominent and joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Although for years there was general warfare between these two groups, in 1955 they merged into the AFL-CIO.

What seems amazing now is that during the period of the Depression in the 1930s, union membership rose substantially and many unions were successful in protecting their members from wage cuts, and even managed wage and benefit increases. Not incidentally, the effect of the success of these unions was to increase wages and benefits for many non-union workers. Since companies often feared unionization, they tried to persuade their employees to not join a union by making their wages and benefits directly compatible with those obtained by the unions. Accordingly, it does seem odd that in the present recession unions have often been held to be part of the problem and their popularity has declined substantially.

The rationale for unions is that they give workers a strong position in determining wages and other benefits against employers who otherwise seem to hold the upper hand. In the Pullman Strike, for example, the Pullman company reduced the wages of their workers who worked 16 hours a day while at the same time refusing to lower the cost of company housing, in which practically all of its workers lived, and maintaining the prices at the company store. The justification for this was that there was a panic in 1893 and the company was losing, or might lose, money. Obviously, the weight of the loss of income was felt by the workers.

It is certainly true that not all unions have been honest and/or wise. Union corruption has been endemic in the labor movement. Notable examples have been the Teamsters and longshoremen unions. Executives in these and other unions have sold their offices to employers or used their power to impose on employers terms so onerous as to make doing business nearly impossible, or forcing employers to raise prices to the detriment of our economy.

In our own area, we have had the recent experience of an extended teachers’ strike in which the teachers’ union insisted on demands entirely out of line with the economy and the ability of the to pay without catastrophic tax increases. There was little doubt that the state-wide Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) had unwisely determined that the local teachers should strike, and the local teachers had little choice but to obey. And the strike, of course, was a disaster for the union local and its members.

The lesson to be learned from our recent teachers’ strike is this: Not every demand by a union is sacrosanct and rejection of ill-chosen demands is not merely the function of right wing extremists. On the other hand, the unionization of teachers has served to make teaching an honorable and reasonably paid profession. Our children are the beneficiaries. This is not some liberal fantasy. It is a fact. The taxpayers and the school board may not like having to deal with a teachers’ union, but it is well that they do and that teachers be protected from the arbitrary actions of whoever happens to be in power at the moment.

The ability of unions to organize and bargain on behalf of their workers is vital to a capitalist society. Otherwise we will revert to the kind of uncontrolled capitalism in which sixteen hour days, sweatshops, bad safety conditions on the job and other abuses of labor occur, as they did in the nineteenth century.

Hail, President Grover Cleveland! May we all celebrate his Labor Day between bites by at least discussing the importance of unions and their genuine contribution to our society.