A Few Thoughts on the Passing of Another Labor Day
Another Labor Day has just come and gone, and it seemed like there was hardly a celebration to be found anywhere. That hasn’t always been the case, though, especially in the house where I grew up. But first, a little Labor Day history:
Labor Day is a national holiday that is over a hundred years old now and it grew out of a celebration and parade in New York City honoring the working class way back in the 1880’s. States like Oregon, Massachusetts and Colorado were the first to declare it a state holiday, and then in 1894, Congress passed a law which finally recognized Labor Day as an official national holiday, to be celebrated on the first Monday of every September.
Now a little family history:
My father spent 39 years of his life working as an electrician for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He got up every morning at the crack of dawn, shaved, put on his work clothes, ate his breakfast, grabbed the lunch pail my mother had prepared for him the night before, and off to “the shops” he went. He liked to get there a little earlier than the rest of the close-knit gang he worked with so that a fresh pot of coffee would be perking away when everyone began arriving for the morning shift. Going home time was at 3:30 in the afternoon and he would usually pull up in front of our house just after I had arrived home from school. He never complained of being tired when his long workday was over, but he often looked that way. He would just quietly deposit his empty lunch pail where he always left it and then shuffle off to the bathroom to wash off all the dirt and grease that had been left on his hands and face from his hard day’s work. The routine of his workweek never varied and missing a day’s work was something he only did if he was sick as a dog. In all those 39 years, I don’t think my father missed more than six or seven days of work.
In my Father’s Day, a job was a very big deal. He had grown up during the Great Depression and had seen up-close-and-personal just how harsh life can be without meaningful work to do. He hadn’t finished high school and when he returned from World War II, there were not enough jobs to go around for all the returning soldiers with a good education, much less those without one. So, the bloated labor market of the late 1940’s was an employers’ dream, and a potential nightmare for men like my father. He wanted to start a family and return his life to normal as soon as possible, but to do that, he needed a job. More specifically, he needed a decent paying job. Not a job with a particularly big paycheck, just one that would allow him to pay the mortgage on a little two-bedroom tract house he had his eyes on in West Sacramento and support the family he and my mother were eager to start.
Once my father found that job, he was determined to keep it, and to do that, he soon learned that he needed to be a “union man”, and for 39 years, his union stood by him and made it possible for his paycheck to go up a little bit every now and then, at least enough to give him the security and dignity deserved by all working men and women. In time, he would even become an officer of his union, and Labor Day was always more to my father than just a time for picnics, barbecues, and maybe a little weekend stay at a campground with his family.
The history of the labor movement in this country is a long and complicated story, going all the way back to a time when organizing a union could be a life and death struggle. Today, thankfully there are no longer company-hired, club-waving thugs to break up union activities, but the struggle for decent wages, hours and working conditions still goes on. Powerful political forces in this country have not been kind to unionized (and non-unionized) labor over the past few decades, and the result has been fewer and fewer good middle-class jobs, with whole generations of young people unable to find work that pays enough for them to leave their parents’ home and get on with starting their own life. In fact, if there is a true national crisis in this country, that is it!
I am always amazed at how the politicians in this great country of ours prioritize things. For instance, they have no problem whatsoever throwing away hundreds of billions of dollars on wars in faraway places like Iraq and Afghanistan that have little or nothing to do with our own national security, yet they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do such labor-related things as increase the minimum wage, or keep good-paying jobs from going overseas, or enact tough laws to increase employee safety in the workplace, or pay enough government lawyers and prosecutors to root out the greed-based corporate corruption that has led to the loss of so many jobs over the years, or set aside enough money to properly back up hard-earned worker pension funds which seem to be going in the toilet almost daily.
Although many of our politicians would have us believe that al-Qaeda or a nuclear Iran or any number of other external threats should be our country’s greatest concern, if my father were still alive, I’m sure he would question putting all of our eggs in that basket. He would say instead that America is (and always has been) only as strong and secure as its labor force and its work ethic, and that our eye should never be taken off that ball. After all, he was part of a generation that stomped out Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, and to my knowledge, the only thing he ever feared in his life was losing his job.
