A Labor Day Call to Arms

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16688

 

A Labor Day Call to Arms

 

 

By Jim Hightower, AlterNet

August 29, 2003

 

Fire up the old grill, do a few twelve-ounce elbow bends to stay limber and just

kick back. That's what Labor Day's all about, isn't it?

 

 

 

No, Labor Day has gone all soft on us, and it's time to harden up on its true

meaning. This holiday is not some vague tribute to men and women who labor.

Rather, it's a radically democratic declaration of the intent to build and

sustain a middle class in America – as bold a statement (and as fraught with

peril) as Jefferson's Declaration. Far from being about taking a day off, Labor

Day is about people taking democratic power.

 

 

 

>From the start, Labor Day was a bottom-up holiday, our only national

celebration to be put on the calendar by the working class. It started when

feisty Matt McGuire of the Carpenters Union and dauntless William McCabe of the

Typographers called for a massive march in New York City to show the strength of

laboring people.

 

 

 

Defying bosses and risking their jobs and personal safety, thousands of workers

of every trade left work on September 5, 1882, and marched with banners, bands

and bravado right up Fifth Avenue, right past the mansions of the Astors,

Vanderbilts, and other Robber Barons.

 

 

 

It was not a parade, but a call to arms, the beginning of labor's fight for an

eight-hour day at fair pay. The demonstration was so successful that it spread

to other cities, and the idea of setting aside a specific day to affirm that

laboring people have rights and are creators of wealth took hold. It was a

demand for respect, finally achieved in 1894 when President Grover Cleveland

signed the law creating Labor Day. What a nice gesture... except that Ol' Grover

had unleashed 12,000 federal troops just days earlier to crush a strike by

Pullman rail car workers, killing dozens of union members.

 

 

 

But that's been the story every step of the way in our under-appreciated

struggle to establish what's become taken for granted as " The American Way of

Life " . The 40-hour work week, the wage floor, collective bargaining, retirement

security, Medicare, job-safety protections, and so much more that sustains the

middle-class possibility for a majority of our people were not provided by the

founders in 1776 – and they certainly were not given to us by generous corporate

chieftains. Rather, the middle-class framework was built by us – We The People.

 

 

 

But now, piece-by-piece, the bosses and politicians are rapidly dismantling this

framework. From global trade scams to almost daily administrative rulings by the

Bush White House, not only are unions and workers generally under assault, but

the very opportunity to achieve a middle-class life is being shut off for

millions of Americans.

 

 

 

We've seen pieces of this theft:

 

 

 

 

the looting of our public treasury through givebacks to the rich;

 

 

 

 

 

 

the White House assault on regulatory protections for everything from

workplace safety to the 40-hour workweek;

 

 

 

 

 

 

the high-tech industry's despicable manipulation of immigration loopholes to

displace middle-class American employees;

 

 

 

 

 

 

the privatization push through every agency of government;

 

 

 

 

 

 

the secretly negotiated trade deals that empower global corporations to

overturn labor protections throughout the world;

 

 

 

 

 

 

the maneuvering to gut the pension laws so corporations can evade their legal

and moral obligations to retirees... and so many more.

 

 

 

 

 

The latest dismantling is a ruling on overtime pay by Bush's Anti-Labor

Department. It lets corporations arbitrarily designate millions of wage workers

as " managerial " employees, exempt from overtime pay. Such workers as nurses,

firefighters and computer programmers will be forced to work more hours for no

pay – taking money out of their pockets, stealing their weekends... and stealing

their right to a life beyond the job.

 

 

 

The whole adds up to far worse than the parts, for it's our egalitarian ethic of

the common good that they are abandoning, our hope for middle-class

possibilities that they're destroying. It's said that the rich and the poor will

always be with us. Perhaps, but it is not assured anywhere or in any time that

the middle class will be there.

 

 

 

This Labor Day is no different than the first one that workers themselves

declared in 1882 – it's about taking back power from the thieves who are trying

to steal our middle-class future. It's time for America's working class to

consider Labor Day again not as a holiday, but as a call to arms.

 

 

 

Jim Hightower is author of " Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country

And It's Time To Take It Back " (Viking, 2003).