Labor Day

Labor Day in the USA and in Canada occurs on the first Monday in September.

The first Labor Day in the United States was observed on September 5, 1882, in Boston, by the Central Labor Union of New York, the nation's first integrated major trade union. It became a federal holiday in 1894, when, following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike. In an attempt to appease the nation's workers, Labor Day is born when President Grover Cleveland fearing further conflict, rushed legislation through Congress unanimously and signed into law a mere six days after the end of the strike. But the movement for a national Labor Day had already been growing for some time. In September 1892, union workers in New York City took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of the holiday. Labor Day was adopted then by the Cleveland Administration as a counterweight to May Day, the international day of labor solidarity adopted by the First Congress of the Second Socialist International in 1889 to commemorate the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886. Labor Day from its outset was meant to symbolize the official American labor movement’s commitment to a more moderate form of politics!

The origins of Labour Day in Canada is even older and can be traced back to December 1872 when a parade was staged in support of the Toronto Typographical Union's strike for a 58-hour work-week. Police arrested 24 leaders of the Typographical Union. Labour leaders decided to called for a demonstration on September 3 to protest the arrests. The Toronto Trades and Labour Council began to hold similar celebrations every spring. American Peter J. McGuire, co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, was asked to speak at a labour festival in Toronto, Canada on July 22, 1882. Returning to the United States, McGuire and the Knights of Labor organised a similar parade based on the Canadian event on September 5, 1882

Union membership continues to slide. The number of American workers in trade unions peaked at over 20 million in the early 1980s, and is now down to 15 million. The unionization rate peaked early – at 25 percent in 1954 – and is now down to 12 percent. In the private sector it is down to 7 percent, as employer resistance and “right to work” laws in 22 mainly southern states have taken their toll. The defeat of the air traffic controllers union by Ronald Reagan in 1981 ushered in here – as Margaret Thatcher's defeat of the miners UK did – an epoch of labor retreat.

On this Labor Day what will there be to rejoice in as this article writes
"There is little to celebrate about the state of American labor. The real value of household median income has declined over the last decade. Unemployment rates remain high. It is a great time for attacking American labor. It is a great time for blaming the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers for stopping Boeing from bringing jobs to the Carolinas. It is a great time for flushing public sector unionism out of Wisconsin and Ohio. In the well-established litany of the American Right, trade unions stand condemned for causing unemployment (by inflating wages), for creating inequality (by depressing the wages of the non-unionized), and for blocking investment and productivity growth (through their resistance to change). But American labor did not cause this recession, and is not prolonging it. American capital did, and is. The cause of contemporary unemployment is not trade union power. We are downwind of a recession triggered by Wall Street excess. Trade unions are not the cause of low wages among the non-unionized. Try looking instead at the negative impact of "right to work" legislation on wages here in the South. Investment is not currently blocked by trade union pressure on corporate profits. Trade unions are too weak for that. Corporate profits are too high. We have been led (and misled) by corporate America for far too long. It's time for labor to say "enough!"

David Coates, the Worrell Chair of Anglo-American Studies at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. Further facts and figures from his website are

Unemployment is currently running at 9.1 percent, with the latest small drop in the rate almost entirely the product of workers choosing to opt out of the labor force. If the three million workers who have stopped looking for work is included in the total, the unemployment rate is currently 10.7 percent. If workers stuck in part-time employment are added, the rate is 16.1 percent. The number of American workers without employment for more than a year was at 4.4 million in July – encompassed one unemployed worker in three. (Unemployment rates adjusted to U.S. concepts are currently 4.2 percent in Holland and 6.6 percent in Germany, as against 7.8 percent in the U.K.)

Wages for the employed remain stuck or falling. Even before the recession, to the degree that the typical American family was able to increase its income, that increase was almost entirely because parents were working more – not because they were earning more per hour. In 2009 , the typical two-parent family worked 26 percent longer than the typical family in 1975, at the end of a decade in which the median family income had actually shrunk – for the first time in any decade since the Great Depression – by 4.9 percent. If income inequality had remained at its 1980 level right through to 2011, that median family income would have been $12,500 higher. The United States remains the only major industrial economy without any statutory paid vacation time or paid public holidays, or that it is this economy which scores highest among leading industrial economies in the numbers of weeks worked per year (45.9 in 2007, the German figure was 41.) American wage rates are lower than those in much of northern continental Europe; northern European workers enjoy bargaining rights and welfare payments far in excess of those enjoyed here. Personal consumption for the American workers, came to rest increasingly on credit-card debt. The personal debt that alone sustained consumption now weighs like a nightmare on the living standards of the average American.

And the myth was spread about – behind the euphemism of a defense of “the right to work” – that it was trade union and worker rights, rather than the culture of hire-and-fire ("labor flexibility"), which were holding back American enterprise and robbing the U.S. economy of its global competitive edge. Capitalist apologists regularly wax lyrical on the wonders of unregulated markets, and on the evils of institutions like trade unions that seek to counter them. Trade unions stand accused of causing unemployment by inflating wages, of generating inequality by disadvantaging the non-unionized, and of blocking productivity growth and investment by defending outmoded working practices and staffing levels. Labor markets are always stacked heavily against workers. There is an asymmetry of power between the individual employee and his/her employer that can only be leveled if workers act together; and even when they do, the vulnerability of entire workforces to the complete loss of their income and benefits through unemployment always gives employers the edge. The current weakness of American trade unions makes the power gradient operating against labor here already steep, and the bosses now want to steepen it more. The main cause of unemployment is not trade union power. It is recession. Low wages among the non-unionized are not caused by trade unionism elsewhere. They are caused by “right to work” laws that block collective worker action.

But of course inequality has not remained unchanged. In the contrary, both income and wealth inequality are now at record levels, and corporate profits have bounced back to pre-2007 proportions. In 2009, 14.3 percent of all Americans – some 43.6 million people – lived at or below the poverty line; and maybe one in three Americans struggled on incomes that were less than double that level. One white American in ten lived in poverty in 2009. One African-American in four lived in poverty. So too did one Hispanic-American in four. Four million more children live in poverty now than was the case just a decade ago. The OECD was recording the United States as having the fourth greatest level of income inequality per head in all the countries it surveyed, and when the median pay for top executives in the 200 largest U.S. companies was rising (in 2010 from 2009) by a staggering 23 percent, to reach $10.8 million per executive. Only could Fox News pundits describe billionaire Warren Buffet as a “socialist” for suggesting that the wealthy should pay more taxes. Only Fox News could accuse Warren Buffet of mounting “class warfare” for proposing to close some tax loopholes and return the top marginal tax rate to what it was when Bill Clinton was president. Only Fox News could accuse Obama of "socialism"

Many working Americans now vote against their economic interests. Unions have donated more than $575 million to politicians over the past 21 years - most of it to Democrats. "Unions fail partly from the injudicious use of their powers" wrote Marx. Socialists warn their fellow unionists what pitfalls are in store for them and their class if they give their time, money and votes to a party which can only work in the interests of their masters. It is time that cash was directed at more worthwhile causes such as organizing. But as weak and ineffective as the labor movement is today, it is still a threat.

The history of the American movement is rich with examples of the importance of unions to workers. The struggles waged and the gains won by workers demonstrate what can be achieved through organizing on the economic field. We have the unions to thank for a lot of things we take for granted: the eight-hour workday, child labor laws, health and safety standards and the weekend. And studies show that a large union presence in an industry or region can raise wages even for non-union workers. The history of the labor movement proves the Marxian contention that wages are not regulated by any "iron law" but can be modified by organized militant action on the part of the workers. The editorial writers of Fox News may rhapsodize on the subject of individualism, but the men and women in the auto plants know that as individuals they would be as helpless before the mighty corporation that hire them without labor solidarity. The necessity of native-born and foreign workers; black, hispanic and white, to march together on picket lines, to work together in strike committees and hold out together until their demands are won - all this constitutes an object lesson in class solidarity that American and Canadian workers must learn and practice.

As you enjoy this holiday just remember it was paid for by union work and union blood.