Labor Day is still the bone they throw us to avoid giving us the steak we've been eyeing up

Today's post is a revision of last year's Labor Day post, which was itself a revision of the entry I wrote two years before that. I think I may continue rewriting it every year until what it says no longer applies. I'm afraid it could be a while....

---

It's good to have a special day dedicated to workers, but the extent to which a country really values workers isn't measured by having one holiday or making commercials about how committed company X is to its workers. By any realistic measure, in our economy workers are not so much valued as quantified. Labor is a cost to be minimized, a factor in productivity to be maximized. In short: get as much as you can out of workers and give as little back as possible. Individual businesses do better than this, but this is the systemic trend.

Perhaps nothing says "I love you" (or the inverse) in this case so well as vacation time, and if we look at the nations of the industrialized world, it's clear who values labor as people by giving them time to be people instead of workers. This ABCNews article points out that the U.S. is one of the only major countries without any guaranteed vacation time; the average vacation time, however, is 10.2 days per year. The article cites 17 European countries, all of which have 20-25 days guaranteed, as well as those notoriously industrious Japanese with 10 guaranteed and an average of 18 and China which is guaranteed 15 (and take precisely 15!). Another article, from Joe Kissell's Interesting Thing of the Day points out that these guaranteed days are in addition to national holidays, whereas a lot of those holidays in America are sort of allowed but not necessarily encouraged. The ABCNews article goes on to point out that many Americans are reluctant to take time off (unemployment is good for businesses because it makes workers more expendable and thus scared), and even when they do take time off they're often still working at home. The second article I cited uses anecdotal evidence for 6 weeks being pretty standard in Switzerland (this appears exaggerated, but it says something that this is the perception of things there, this is what is cosidered normal) vs. the two weeks that Americans feel fortunate to get.

More, though, the article points out that it's not just about vacation time; Europe has a standard work week of 35 hours, a number which is actually adhered to. Our 40-hour workweek is, for many Americans, a fiction. You may get paid for 40 hours, but it's expected that you will do 50 or 60, whatever is needed to keep your projects on schedule. Interestingly, this article tells us that studies show that productivity isn't actually impacted that much by the shorter workweek--it seems that Europeans generally work harder when they're actually at work, while Americans spend more time socializing (Office Space, anyone?). Maybe because Americans know they're getting screwed and so do as little as they can get away with--we take our time where we can get it. The article points out that the shorter workweek does--at least sometimes--lower pay, but it also lowers unemployment. Perhaps the difference is that in Europe the labor unions are stronger, whereas business (i.e. ownership and management) is stronger in the U.S.

Another aspect of this issue is a way that Americans are coerced to work more: health care. If you decided to simplify your life by working less and accepting less money so that you could do things that are more important to you (raise your kids, spend time on a hobby, have sex more often--whatever), there's still an incentive for you to work more: the prohibitive cost of health care if it isn't provided by your employer--and it won't be if you're not a full-time employee working at "a good enough" job where you'll get health insurance. How did we end up this way? I've heard figures that suggest that less overall money would be spent for centralized health care than is being paid now. And there's the crux of it, no doubt. It's just a little side benefit to business interests, that we're encouraged to work full-time to get health care. The real benefit is the money to be made by insurance companies. So much money, in fact, that the insurance lobbies can consistently defeat attempts to reform health care and, if/when health care is "reformed," you can bet the changes won't hurt insurance companies' bottom lines any more than they have to. It's not just manipulation of politicians, of course, but also systematic disinformation and distortions to keep just enough voters against universal health care.

Labor Day became a national holiday in 1887 under Grover Cleveland's presidency. It started from a parade held by the Knights of Labor in 1882. Most of the rest of the world, under the International Workingmen's Association, holds Labor Day on May 1. Cleveland only made it a holiday so that it would officially be in September rather than in May. Why? To de-politicize it. May 1, 1886 was an organized strike by unions in Chicago, wanting the radical 8-hour work day. They were joined over the next few days by 350,000 workers nationwide, including 70,000 in Chicago. When a fight broke out, police took the opportunity to attack the strikers, killing two. Since it wasn't exactly uncommon for the police to side with business owners against strikers (in fact, it was the consistent trend--property and profits have long been more important than people), many people believed that the police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests. On May 4, there was a rally, which the police eventually ordered to disperse by marching in formation toward the speakers' wagon. Someone threw a bomb at the police line, killing one. The police opened fire, ultimately causing the death of 11. Seven labor leaders were tried for inciting the violence that led to the policeman's death and (surprise, surprise!) they were found guilty. Most of them were hanged. Outraged unions and labor movements across the world protested.

So you see why Cleveland didn't want a May 1 Labor Day? A May 1 Labor Day could have been seen as a commemoration of Chicago's Haymarket Riots, as a rallying for the labor movement akin to "remember the Alamo!" And we couldn't have that. This less-politicized holiday was about all that labor would willingly get from the government for the next several decades. Government has always been on the side of the moneyed elite, and perhaps never more so than this period in history. The political party that really stood up for labor (I mean the socialists) was vilified and all but destroyed in our country by our government. Much like in the Middle East, the government wants democracy only insofar as democracy does what it's "supposed" to do.

And it worked. Labor day is for sales (ensuring that some people do have to work!), for barbeques, for getting to the beach one last time before summer gasps its last breaths. Beaches and bbq are, you understand, good things: opportunities to spend time with family and friends, to relax, to whatever, but there's little even remotely political about it. That would be fine, if Labor Day was just one day that we didn't worry about the politics of these issues, but instead it's just one more day that we don't worry about it.

I say all of this largely to remind us of a few things. First, that labor, to the people in charge, is still a cost to be minimized (by paying less, by laying off, by outsourcing to other countries) and a resource whose efficiency must be maximized (by demanding more). They want us to be human doings, not human beings; they want us to be workers, not people. In order for us to have greater opportunities to make something of our lives besides work, we should be demanding more--universal health care, more vacation, shorter work-weeks. The only way most businesses will do this is under government pressure--which is convenient for most businesses since the government will do as much as it can to keep them happy and as little as it can get away with to keep the rest of us happy. I realize that I'm saying all of this in a period during which our economy is in somewhat of a slump and some will argue that businesses cannot afford to make these concessions now. To which I say: baloney. The slowing economy right now doesn't mean that businesses are losing money, it means that they aren't making as much money as they would like. They'll lay off people or hire less to keep their profits high for their shareholders and management bigwigs, not to keep the company solvent. There's plenty of money available to better the lot of workers if we get rid of the golden parachutes that let bad managers run practices that hurt the workers and the shareholders and then get away with a big severance check for his incompetence (or willful mismanagement). There's plenty of money available if we just narrow the gap between the obscene amounts being made at the top and what the rest of us get.

I know that as a teacher, who's just coming off of 3 months of vacation, I don't seem to have a stake in all of this. It's true: I'll get my days off regardless. But that's just the thing here: I'm not looking for a benefit for myself--I'm interested in justice as I see it. Justice for working people instead of justice for those who can afford to buy it.

Happy Labor Day.

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit