This is the third time that my September 5 blog post has been made on Labor Day, but on this date in 2011 and 2016 I made no reference at all to it being a federal holiday in the U.S. But now I am sharing some reflections on the history and significance of Labor Day—and of labor unions.
On June 28, 1894, President Cleveland signed S. 730 into
law declaring Labor Day a national holiday. Since 1882, Labor Day had been
celebrated at local and state levels, and from 1887 to 1894, 23 states had enacted
a Labor Day holiday. Now it had become a nationwide observance.
It is highly ironic that the creation of Labor Day in 1894
came in the midst of the Pullman Strike, one of the most consequential strikes
in U.S. history.*
Just four days after Cleveland signed the Labor Day bill, the
U.S. Attorney General got an injunction against the strike, and on July 3 the President
dispatched federal troops to enforce the injunction. Then on the 7th,
the Guardsmen fired upon the strikers; 30 were killed and many more wounded.
What a sad start for the new federal holiday to honor the
nation’s working class!
Despite Labor Day becoming an official national holiday
in 1894, it took decades as well as much struggle and suffering for
laboring people to achieve the reforms they had ardently sought.
From long before 1894, the laborers clamored for an
eight-hour workday and a forty-hour workweek. They also called for safer
working conditions, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and the end to
child labor.
The appeals/demands of the labor movement were augmented by
some prominent religious voices. For example, in 1886 Walter Rauschenbusch
began his pastorate of a Baptist Church in "Hell's Kitchen," New York.
His first-hand experiences there led Rauschenbusch to lead
what became the Social Gospel movement, which was to a large extent the
struggle against systemic injustices foisted upon exploited laboring people in
New York and elsewhere.**
Then in 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued “Rights and Duties of
Capital and Labor,” an encyclical addressing the condition of the working
classes.
The Pope’s primary concern was some amelioration of “the
misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working
class,” and to that end, he supported the rights of labor to form trade unions
and to engage in collective bargaining.
Such efforts and support were still necessary for long after
1894. Finally in 1938, President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act
(FLSA). That law established a minimum wage (of 25 cents per hour!)
The FLSA also instituted a standardized 44-hour work week,
which later dropped to 40 hours, a requirement to pay extra for overtime work,
and a prohibition on certain types of child labor.
Even though it was forty-four years later, the dreams surrounding
the founding of Labor Day in 1894 were finally realized, and labor unions
experienced widespread growth and acceptance over the next 20+ years.
Support for labor unions was highest in the 1950s when three-fourths of USAmericans approved of them. According to a recent Gallup
Poll (see
here), now over 70% approve of unions, the highest point since 1965.
This is a good sign—as are recent initiatives by Amazon
employees and Starbucks baristas to form unions.
President Biden, thankfully, is a big supporter of labor
unions. In his remarks
in honor of labor unions last September, the President said that “a union
means there is democracy. . . . Organizing, joining a union—that’s democracy in
action.”
In his Labor
Day Proclamation last Friday (Sept. 2), President Biden said, “I call upon
all public officials and people of the United States to observe this day with
appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities that honor the energy and
innovation of working Americans.”
No matter how, or whether, you celebrate Labor Day
today, remember those across the nation who are part of the laboring class, those
people who are working for an hourly wage including many who are still working
for a highly-inadequate minimum wage and still unable to form a labor union.
_____
* In May 2022, History.com (here) posted “10 Major Labor Strikes Throughout U.S. History.”
Following the disastrous Homestead Steel Strike of 1892, the Pullman Strike is
the second of those ten. For more about the latter, see “How a Deadly Railroad
Strike Led to the Labor Day Holiday” (here).
** See
here for my Sept. 30, 2021, blog post about Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel.
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For those of you who might like to read a bit more about Labor Day in the U.S. from 1882 to 1894 (and about President Cleveland), I commend Heather Cox Richardson's "Letter from an American," which she posted last night. (The link is https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-4-2022 .)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Leroy, for the focus on labor. When I was still teaching, I would remind my students that we can sit in that classroom reading books and think big thoughts only because the farmers and workers outside the classroom are making it possible. I have been a union member and voted in one, successful election to unionize a shop (school bus drivers in the special School District of St. Louis Count). Subsequently, I switched to truck driving for a year as a member of Teamsters Local 600, the second largest Teamsters Local in the country at that time and helped run an election for a friend who ran for the presidency of the Local. He and I published a newspaper with Teamster friends that we called "Labor's Call." All of this was documented in my M.A. thesis, "Labor's Call: A Case Study of a Local Union Election Campaign. So you're strumming my strings with this blog entry.
ReplyDeleteHere are comments from Thinking Friend Eric Dollard in Chicago:
ReplyDelete"Thanks, Leroy, for your pertinent Labor Day observations.
"I have been a member of a labor union for almost 30 years, although the last 18 years as a member emeritus. After long hesitation, I decided to join the union because workers need an organization that will stand up for the rights of workers. Sometimes the union defended employees, whose complaints were less than convincing, but more often it stood up for unjust actions by management.
"Plus, whatever advantages the union was able to gain in negotiations with management were enjoyed by everyone, members and nonmembers alike. If I am benefitting from the contract negotiated by the union, then I thought I had a responsibility to join the union. And so I did."
I appreciate the above comments by Anton and Eric, both of whom have been members of a labor union--and especially Eric who was in a union for almost 30 years. I appreciate the reason he gave for becoming a union member.
ReplyDeleteMy own experience as a "laborer" has been fairly limited. The summer after June and I married, I did work in a shoe factory for three months before college class started again, but there was no union. They did pay minimum wage, however: $1.00 an hour, which I was happy to receive. Of course, as a teenage farm boy I worked long and hard every summer on the family farm every summer--with no pay but with good room and board!
My main experience with unions was as a part of "management." For eight years when I was chancellor of Seinan Gakuin, the educational institution in Japan I was a part of for 36 years, there were teachers' unions at the university, the junior-senior high school, the kindergarten, and the nursery school. So from time to time I had to be a part of the collective bargaining sessions with all four of those unions. It was quite different, though, being one of the "managers" of a not-for-profit educational institution rather than a for-profit corporation with shareholders wanting more profits.
And here are brief comments from Thinking Friend Glenn Hinson in Kentucky:
ReplyDelete"Thank you for this reminder as to why we observe Labor Day, Leroy. We have two union organizing efforts here in Louisville at the moment."
Dr. Hinson, may those efforts succeed!
DeleteLeroy, I started first grade at Valley View Rural School in Swisher County, Texas the first Monday in September, 1939 (Labor Day). Seven years later I started school as a Frreshman at Tulia High School the first Monday in September, 1946 (Labor Day again). In my public schooling I don't remember Labor Day ever being a school holiday. Swisher County was farm country. And farmers were hostile to organized labor. And poor workers were opposed to government subsidies for poor farmers. (And I use poor as an economic adjective, not referring to the ability of the farmers.) The farmers and the laborers should have been allies. But the monied class tried, usually successfully, to divide us. BTW, my Daddy was a "Yaller Dawg Democrat" who practically worshiped the ground under FDR's feet.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this, Charles. My first year in school was in Kansas, and I have no idea when the first day of school was. But my birth family moved back to Worth County, Missouri, in 1945, and I went to the public school there for the next ten years. As I remember it, every year school started on the Tuesday after Labor Day. But there was no organized labor in the area, so I never heard anything negative about factory workers or other laborers. But I also don't remember there ever being any kind of Labor Day celebration in my home county.
DeleteI was fortunate to be able to grow in that little farm town in Missouri along with my longtime friend-Leroy.
ReplyDeleteI remember that Leroy's family were friends with my parents and they would let me visit with Leroy on their farm in the summer.
I was Never a member of an Union, but I always supported Workers who make our Lives easier and Better!
"This was a really interesting article about Labor Day. A lot here I didn’t know about. Thanks for continuing to teach!" (from Thinking Friend Greg Hadley in Niigata, Japan)
ReplyDeleteThank you. Greg, for reading and responding to this blog post. I appreciate your interest and kind words.
DeleteToday I was finally able to get a library copy of Eric Loomis's book "A History of America in Ten Strikes" (2018). On page 4 he writes, "Labor Day was created as a conservative holiday so that American workers would not celebrate the radical international workers' holiday May Day. Yet today, we do not remember our workers on Labor Day like we remember our veterans on Veterans Day. Instead, Labor Day just serves as the end of summer, a last weekend of vacation before the fall begins. That erasure of workers from our collective sense of ourselves as Americans is a political act."
ReplyDeleteI posted a blog article about May Day on April 30 this year. Here is the link: https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2022/04/how-will-you-observe-may-day.html
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